Drink or not to drink tap water

 It is so sad that "Fukushima", a beautiful and fertile land with warm-hearted people, has become synonymous with "Chernobyl" and "Three Mile Island". I cannot help but pray that those brave people working at the Fukushima nuclear power plants with courage and sense of mission will succeed in bringing the "monster" under complete control and that they will come back safe and sound.

My town Inzai lies 220km south of the Fukushima nuclear power plants and about 35km northeast of the center of Tokyo. It is part of Greater Tokyo, or Tokyo metropolitan area with population of some 36 million.

In the past few days, one of the biggest concerns of the residents of the metropolis is the quality of tap water they drink everyday because they are shocked by the news that the water supplied by a few of the water purification plants in the metropolitan area contained considerably high levels of Iodine-131, a radioactive element, with the counts of up to 298 Bq per liter.

I myself got alarmed and checked, on the Internet, the radiation level of the tap water supplied by the purification plant of my area. The reading of I-131 there, they say, was 28 Bq per liter on 21 March. No more data were available for the following days. However, today's newspaper reports that I-131 levels at all the metropolitan water purification plants have decreased to below 100 Bq per liter. So I assume the situation is the same with our plant.

If I could buy bottled mineral water produced in the western part of Japan which is not contaminated at all, there would be no problem. However, today's newspaper also reports that in Tokyo urban area, people rushed to convenience stores and supermarkets to buy bottled water and the shelves for bottled water and drinks became all empty.

I have decided not to rush to buy bottled water or drinks until the supply becomes normal. Scarce new supply of bottled water should be sold to the family with babies and infants to protect their delicate thyroids. In this situation, if a 61-year-old man like me were to queue up to buy bottled water in the line of mothers with infants, it would be too ugly.

So for me, there is no choice. I am obliged to continue drinking tap water for some time, monitoring the changing counts issued by the prefecture's water service authorities. With the two-digit levels of  I-131 for the time being, I judge that drinking tap water for a few weeks will not cause any serious health risk.