Video shows Mexico sewage discharge, not wastewater from Japan nuclear plant

This article is more than one year old.
Published on August 30, 2023 at 12:02
3 min read
By Tommy WANG, AFP Hong Kong

A video showing dirty water flowing into the sea has resurfaced in Chinese social media posts that falsely link it to Japan's release of wastewater from its stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in August. It actually shows Acapulco bay in Mexico and had circulated in reports about a sewage discharge in the north American nation in June 2020.

"Japan is discharging nuclear wastewater. Will it affect the ecology and life in our country?" reads a Weibo post written in simplified Chinese characters shared on August 25, 2023.

In the accompanying video viewed over 16,000 times, a Spanish-language speaker can be heard saying: "Here we have it, water with waste, completely black sewage water, and garbage, all going straight into our oceans."

A screenshot of the false post, taken on August 29, 2023

Beijing has lashed out at Japan's decision to start releasing more than 500 Olympic swimming pools' worth of diluted wastewater from the Fukushima plant into the Pacific on August 24 and suspended seafood imports from its neighbour.

But the head of the UN atomic watchdog has said the tritium concentration in wastewater being released is under expected levels while Japan has repeatedly insisted the plan will be harmless.

The video was also shared with a similar false claim on X, formerly known as Twitter, as well as on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok's Chinese version Douyin.

Reverse image searches of the video's keyframes on Google followed by keyword searches found it was filmed in Mexico.

Acapulco discharge

AFP found Reuters had published a similar video on X on June 30, 2020, captioned: "Wastewater runoff sparks contamination fears in Mexico's iconic Acapulco bay" (archived link).

The news agency also published a report on July 1, 2020 about the incident, which said the the beach was sullied by "a large discharge of raw sewage" (archived link).

"State officials said that initial reports indicate that the discharge may have been related to a problem with overflowing sewers potentially made worse by heavy rainfall in recent days which has caused flooding in several Acapulco neighborhoods," the article reads.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video falsely shared on Weibo (left) and the one published by Reuters (right):

Screenshot comparison of the video falsely shared on Weibo (left) and the one published by Reuters (right)

A video of the incident taken from a slightly different angle was also published in a report by Mexican media Milenio on June 26, 2020.

AFP geolocated the video using high-rise buildings seen in the falsely shared video's 23-second mark, which correspond to Google Earth imagery of the Acapulco beach.

Below is a screenshot comparison the frame from the video (left) and the same location on Google Earth (right) with the matching structures highlighted by AFP:

Video in the false posts (left) and imagery from Google Earth (right)

In a statement on July 14, 2020, Mexico's National Water Commission (Conagua) said it had filed a criminal complaint against the agency responsible for wastewater and the municipal sewage system in Acapulco over the incident.

AFP has previously debunked posts sharing the video with a different false claim.

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