A pro-China disinformation network is distorting legitimate scientific research to undermine Japan, after Tokyo announced plans to release more than 1 million tonnes of treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, beginning in 2023.

The radiation levels of the wastewater from Fukushima, the site of a devastating nuclear disaster in 2011, should fall within the safe standards for drinking water. However, the decision to dump it into the ocean has been heavily criticized by environmental groups and neighboring countries, including China. 

According to new research shared exclusively with Coda Story from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which analyzes global disinformation networks, prominent Chinese journalists, government officials, and a cluster of five pro-China “super-spreader” Twitter accounts are misrepresenting a 2012 simulation of the dispersal of radioactive materials after the Fukushima disaster, in order to claim that the wastewater is dangerous. The simulation, conducted by scientists at the German research institute GEOMAR, is about the long-term impact of the nuclear accident, not Japan’s wastewater disposal plans.

“We are aware that the 2012 study is repeatedly taken out of context and misquoted in social media and by others,” said Jan Steffen, a communications representative at Geomar, in a statement to Coda Story. “A direct transfer of the modeling at that time to current events is therefore not serious from a scientific point of view.”