Business

Seafood Is Safe After Fukushima Water Dump, but Some Won’t Eat It

Published

1 year ago

August 25, 2023

Seafood Is Safe After Fukushima Water Dump, but Some Won’t Eat It

Seafood is having a bad week in East Asia, which is bad news for a region where it’s a major part of the diet.

Experts say Japan’s discharge into the ocean of treated radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant, which began on Thursday, does not and will not pose health risks to people who eat seafood. But even though the scientific evidence bears that out, not everyone is convinced.

On Thursday, the Chinese government widened a ban on seafood imports to include all of Japan instead of only some regions. The wastewater release has been heavily politicized and fueled deep anxiety over seafood in both China and South Korea, leaving some wondering whether sushi, sashimi and other products were still safe.

At Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul on Friday, fish vending associations had put up banners urging consumers to not give in to paranoia.

“Our seafood is safe!” one read. “Let’s consume with confidence!”

“Don’t create anxiety with unsubstantiated myths and exaggerations!” said another.

Yoo Jae-bong, 52, who was trying to sell fresh halibut, croaker and sea bream at the market, the city’s largest, said there had been a rush of customers the day before the water was released.

“Then it died down,” he said. “There’s a lot of fear in the air.”

The wastewater released into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday is the first tranche of more than a million tons that is scheduled to be discharged over the next 30 years. The Japanese government and the electric utility that operated the plant have promised that the water is safe for humans.

International experts agree. The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog has said contamination of seafood outside the plant’s direct vicinity will be “significantly below any public health concern.” Independent scientists also say that Japan’s decision makes technical sense; that similar releases have occurred around the world without incident; and that the extra radiation will be tiny relative to what’s already in the ocean.

But ever since Japan announced its discharge plan two years ago, the issue has been contentious inside and outside the country — particularly in South Korea, a former Japanese colony where anti-Japanese sentiment tends to run high.

In those two years, the Japanese authorities and the international scientific community have failed to effectively communicate the science around the discharge and explain why the risks to public health are exceedingly low, said Nigel Marks, a physics and astronomy professor at Curtin University in Australia. As a result, he said, misinformation has filled the void and undermined public confidence in Japan’s plans.

“Nature abhors a vacuum, and everyone just poured in, and some of it stuck,” Mr. Marks said by phone on Friday.

“I’m sure they’d love to run it all over again and do it better,” he said, referring to the authorities.

Hirokazu Matsuno, a spokesman for the Japanese government, told reporters this week that it had “thoroughly tried to explain” the issue to the international community “based on scientific grounds and with a high degree of transparency.”

Ahead of the initial wastewater release on Thursday, several Chinese sushi brands either declared that their ingredients were not from Japan or promised to get rid of any that were. The Chinese government has fanned outrage in recent weeks over Japan’s plan to release the treated water, and tensions between the two countries rose further after the signing last week of a trilateral security pact between Japan, South Korea and the United States.

In Seoul, it has been common to see protesters holding signs showing dead fish and the radiation symbol.

This week, regional anxiety around fish and seafood, and the arguments for why it is still perfectly safe to eat, have gone into overdrive.

One sign of the anxiety emerged Thursday when the Seoul police detained 16 college students who had tried to barge into the building that houses the Japanese Embassy. Before they were taken away for questioning, the students unfurled banners and shouted slogans protesting the Fukushima water discharge.

In another indication of worry, there was plenty of fresh fish for sale at Noryangjin Fish Market on Friday — mackerel, octopus and sea bass, all swimming in tanks — but the vast concourse was so empty of people that a reporter could easily count the shoppers. Most fishmongers at the market, where the seafood is mainly from Korean waters, were looking at their phones or staring into space.

In Hong Kong, a Chinese territory where the local government has banned seafood from some but not all Japanese prefectures, the topic of seafood safety has been popular on social media this week.

Ivan Kwai, the manager of Kyouichi, a sushi and sashimi restaurant in Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay district, said on Friday that bookings had recently dropped by half.

“People have lost confidence,” Mr. Kwai, 60, said as he tapped a finger over his booking ledger. He added that he planned to replace his supply of Japanese products with Norwegian salmon, Canadian sea urchins and other imports.

As of Friday, it was unclear what impact anti-seafood sentiment would have on Japan’s exports in the longer term. But early data is not encouraging. China’s state-run news media said this week that imports of seafood products from Japan in July had fallen 29 percent compared with the same month a year earlier, a drop that Japanese news reports have linked to checks on seafood coming from Japan for traces of radiation.

If the negative sentiment sticks, it could potentially have a big impact on Japan’s economy. Last year, the country’s seafood exports were worth 387 billion yen, or about $2.6 billion, official data shows. Sales to China and Hong Kong accounted for more than 40 percent of the total.

That helps explain why, on Wednesday, Japan’s economic minister, Yasutoshi Nishimura, ate sashimi in Tokyo as news cameras rolled. “It’s really the best!” he said.

Not everyone in East Asia is bothered by the Fukushima wastewater release, of course.

At a branch of Umimachidon, a Japanese chain restaurant in Hong Kong that is famous for its sashimi rice bowl, a line formed during lunchtime on Friday.

“I’m not worried” about contamination, said Edward Yeung, 30, as he stood in line with his family. “I want to eat as much as I can before the price goes up.”

Siyi Zhao and Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting.

Business

Cleveland-Cliffs Signals a Possible New Bid for U.S. Steel

Published

5 hours ago

January 14, 2025

Press Room

Cleveland-Cliffs Signals a Possible New Bid for U.S. Steel

A possible new takeover bid for U.S. Steel emerged on Monday, teeing up more turmoil over the once-dominant company’s future after President Biden’s decision to block its acquisition by a Japanese company.

Lourenco Goncalves, the chief executive of an American competitor, Cleveland-Cliffs, said his company had “an All-American solution to save the United States Steel Corporation,” stressing that acquiring U.S. Steel was a matter of “when,” not “if.” But he offered no details of the bidding plans.

The renewed expression of interest from Cleveland-Cliffs comes less than two weeks after Mr. Biden blocked a $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, arguing that the sale posed a threat to national security. Cleveland-Cliffs tried to buy U.S. Steel in 2023, an offer that was rejected in favor of Nippon’s higher bid.

CNBC reported on Monday morning that Cleveland-Cliffs would seek to take over U.S. Steel and sell off its subsidiary, Big River Steel, to Nucor, another American producer. But Mr. Goncalves, at a news conference later in the day, would not confirm any partnership with Nucor on a bid.

U.S. Steel and Nucor did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Investors seemed pleased by the potential bid, sending shares of U.S. Steel up as much as 10 percent on Monday when CNBC reported the potential offer. Shares of U.S. Steel finished about 6 percent higher on Monday but are down 23 percent over the past year, including Monday’s spike.

But the fate of Nippon’s proposed takeover remains in limbo. U.S. Steel and Nippon sued the United States government last week in the hopes of reviving their merger, accusing Mr. Biden and other senior administration officials of corrupting the review process for political gain and blocking the deal under false pretenses.

The companies filed a separate lawsuit against Cleveland-Cliffs, Mr. Goncalves and David McCall, international president of the United Steelworkers union. They argue that Cleveland-Cliffs and the head of the union illegally colluded to undermine the Nippon deal, assertions that both defendants called “baseless.”

On Saturday, the companies said the Biden administration had delayed enforcement of its executive order blocking Nippon’s takeover until June, to give the courts time to review the lawsuit.

“The problem is, we can’t make anything happen until the current management and the current board of U.S. Steel make the decision to abandon the merger agreement with Nippon Steel,” Mr. Goncalves said at a news conference in Butler, Pa., on Monday.

Given this rancor, it is unclear how receptive U.S. Steel would be to a new bid by Cleveland-Cliffs. If U.S. Steel does not engage, one option would be for Cleveland-Cliffs to take an offer to shareholders.

U.S. Steel was once the world’s largest steel producer, but the company has fallen in global rankings in recent years. Concerns about its long-term future are rooted in a failure to quickly adopt alternatives to traditional mills that are more energy-efficient and cost-effective. Nippon, U.S. Steel has argued, is the only buyer that can make substantial investments in multiple steel mills and protect jobs.

The United Steelworkers, which represents 11,000 U.S. Steel employees, has voiced strong opposition to the proposed merger with Nippon. The powerful union has said the Japanese company engaged in illegal trade practices and dealt with the union in bad faith. Previously, the union expressed its preference for a merger with Cleveland-Cliffs, which is unionized.

A new bid by Cleveland-Cliffs, if it materializes, risks antitrust scrutiny from federal antitrust regulators, though regulators in the Trump administration are widely expected to take a less aggressive approach to merger enforcement than their Biden administration predecessors.

Business

Supreme Court denies oil industry plea to block climate lawsuits filed by California, other blue states

Published

5 hours ago

January 14, 2025

Press Room

Supreme Court denies oil industry plea to block climate lawsuits filed by California, other blue states

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt a major setback to the oil industry Monday, refusing to block lawsuits from California and other blue states that seek billions of dollars in damages for the effects of climate change.

Without a comment or dissent, the justices turned down closely watched appeals from Sunoco, Shell and other energy producers.

In Sunoco vs. Honolulu, the oil industry urged the justices to intervene in these state cases and rule that because climate change is a global phenomenon, it is a matter for federal law only, not one suited to state-by-state claims.

“The stakes could not be higher,” they told the court.

But none of the justices said they wanted to hear their claim, at least not now.

The decision clears the way for more than two dozen suits filed by states and municipalities to move forward and try to prove their claim that the major oil producers knew of the potential damage of burning fossil fuels but chose to conceal it.

“Big Oil companies keep fighting a losing battle to avoid standing trial for their climate lies,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity. “With this latest denial, the fossil fuel industry’s worst nightmare — having to face the overwhelming evidence of their decades of calculated climate deception — is closer than ever to becoming a reality.”

Two years ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against five of the largest oil and gas companies — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — and the American Petroleum Institute for what they described as a “decades-long campaign of deception” that created climate-related harms in California.

“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us — covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet,” Newsom said in announcing the suit.

In recent days, California officials have blamed climate change for the devastating weather conditions that contributed to the deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and other structures, leading to what many experts expect to become the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

California’s suit followed the pattern set by similar claims from the cities of Baltimore, New York, Chicago and San Francisco as well as blue states including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Minnesota.

These suits argue that the oil producers used deceptive marketing to hide the danger of burning fossil fuels. Under state law, companies can be held liable for failing to warn consumers of a known danger.

In June 2024, the court asked the Justice Department to weigh in on the issue. In December, lawyers for the Biden administration urged the court to stand aside for now because the suits are at an early stage.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he took no part in the decision to deny the appeals, presumably because he owns stock in companies affected by the dispute.

The climate change lawsuits were patterned after the successful mass lawsuits filed by states and others against the tobacco industry over cigarettes and the pharmaceutical industry over opioids.

Cigarettes and opioids were sold legally, but the suits alleged that industry officials conspired to deceive the public and hide the true dangers of their highly profitable products.

Under state law, plaintiffs can seek damages for broad and open-ended claims such as a failure to warn of a danger, false advertising or creating a public nuisance. All three claims are cited in California’s lawsuit. Federal law, by contrast, is usually limited to damage claims that are authorized by Congress.

Had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the oil industry’s appeal in the Hawaii case, it “would have frozen the cases for a year or more and could have resulted in a death blow for all of them,” said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law expert at the Vermont Law School.

Los Angeles lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who represents Chevron, said the company “will continue to defend against meritless state law climate litigation, which clashes with basic constitutional principles, undermines sound energy policy.”

Meanwhile, Alabama and 20 red states urged the court to throw out these blue-state lawsuits. They said liberal states and their judges should not have the power to set the nation’s policy on the energy industry. The court has not ruled on that claim yet.

The case dismissed Monday began five years ago when the city and county of Honolulu sued Sunoco and 14 other major oil and gas producers, alleging a failure to warn and creating a nuisance.

The Hawaii Supreme Court last year rejected the industry’s motion and refused to dismiss the suit.

“Simply put, the plaintiffs say the issue is whether defendants misled the public about fossil fuels’ dangers and environmental impact. We agree …. This suit does not seek to regulate emissions and does not seek damages for interstate emissions,” the state court said in a unanimous opinion. “Rather, plaintiffs’ complaint clearly seeks to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil-fuel products without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign.”

Business

How the NFL Moved the Vikings-Rams Playoff Game Away From the L.A. Fires

Published

12 hours ago

January 13, 2025

Press Room

How the NFL Moved the Vikings-Rams Playoff Game Away From the L.A. Fires

Matthew Giachelli got the call he anticipated on Thursday morning: The N.F.L. was moving the Rams’ playoff game to Arizona because of the wildfires raging in Los Angeles, and the league needed 200 gallons of paint pronto.

The game on Monday between the Rams and the Minnesota Vikings would now be held at State Farm Stadium outside Phoenix, and it had to look and feel as if it were being played in the Rams’ usual home, SoFi Stadium. That included painting the field with the team’s and league’s logos and colors. The hometown Cardinals, though, did not have some of the needed hues on hand, including the Rams’ blue and yellow.

Giachelli’s company, World Class Athletic Surfaces in tiny Leland, Miss., provides paint to most N.F.L. and top college teams. Within hours, he and his co-workers had loaded five-gallon buckets of nine custom paint colors, as well as stencils for the N.F.L. playoff logos, onto a truck that left Thursday afternoon on a 1,500-mile journey to Arizona.

“I definitely regret what’s going on in California, but I’m glad we could meet their needs,” said Giachelli, the vice president of production and distribution.

Getting the right paint was just one of hundreds of details that the league, the Rams, the Vikings, the host Arizona Cardinals and ASM Global, which operates State Farm Stadium, have juggled since the N.F.L. decided to move the wild-card round game.

The N.F.L. has canceled preseason games and postponed and moved regular-season games over the years because of hurricanes, snowstorms and other calamities. But it had not moved a winner-take-all playoff showdown since 1936, when the site of its championship game was changed from Boston to New York to drum up ticket sales.

A battalion of people — from the front-office workers to the training staffs to the thousands of game-day workers — have been mobilized on short notice. Each game, particularly in the playoffs, generates tens of millions of dollars for television networks, advertisers and stadium operators, and with the season coming down to its last few weeks, there was little margin for error.

“If it can be played, they play it, and in this case, it can be played in Glendale,” said Joe Buck, who will call the game for ESPN on Monday. “We’re in the playoffs now, and you’ve got all this pressure to get this first round finished before Kansas City and Detroit,” which had first-round byes, “get back in.”

A big reason the N.F.L. is the world’s most valuable league is scarcity. There are just 272 regular-season games and 13 playoff games, so each one is of critical importance to the 32 teams. (By contrast, there are about 400 Major League Baseball games every month during the season.) They are also critical to the owners of those teams and the league, as well as broadcast networks, sponsors and other companies that spend billions of dollars a year to attach their businesses and brands to the N.F.L.

It has not escaped notice that one of those businesses, State Farm, will have its name attached to Monday night’s broadcast less than a year after it announced that it would not renew 30,000 homeowner policies and 42,000 policies for commercial apartments in California. (The N.F.L. has donated $5 million to Los Angeles relief efforts.)

With so much riding on each contest, the N.F.L. does everything it can to play every game every year. When the league creates its season schedule each spring, it prepares contingency plans including an alternate site for each game. In 2022, when a massive snowstorm hit western New York, the Buffalo Bills played a home game at Ford Field in Detroit.

During the pandemic, outbreaks in locker rooms forced the league to postpone several games, though none were canceled. When pandemic conditions in Santa Clara County, Calif., deteriorated, the San Francisco 49ers moved to Arizona for a month, playing three home games in State Farm Stadium. Arizona was also a backstop in 2003 when the Chargers moved their home game against the Miami Dolphins because of fires in San Diego.

This time, the fires spread so quickly, the league decided to move the game five days before kickoff. Kevin Demoff, the president of the Rams, said the team had been in constant contact with officials in Los Angeles, who initially thought the game could be held at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which was unaffected by the fires.

But that changed midweek, when fires broke out close to the team’s training facility in Woodland Hills, forcing some players and staff to evacuate their homes and for one practice to be cut short. Demoff said he did not want the players and staff to be distracted, nor did he want city and county resources to be diverted for the game when they could be used to help others in need.

Moving the game is “just a recognition that there’s some things bigger than football and we owe this to our community to make sure that this game can be played safely and not be a distraction,” Demoff said Friday.

ESPN was on hold as well. Four of its production trucks were en route to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh when the league told the network on Wednesday night that the game could be moved to Glendale. The crews spent the night in Kingman, Ariz. On Thursday, the plan was to set up in both stadiums in case the league waited until Saturday to decide where to play. So the trucks continued on to Los Angeles while another set of trucks left for Glendale. When the N.F.L. said Thursday that the game had been moved, the first set of trucks, which had reached Ontario, Calif., turned around and arrived in Glendale with time to spare.

The Cardinals also helped out the Rams in ways beyond just lending their stadium. The team’s owner, Michael Bidwill, sent two team planes to Los Angeles to help the Rams get their entourage and equipment to Arizona.