The owner of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant will likely have to dump tons of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean as it runs out of storage facilities, Japan’s environment Minister has said.

Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, has collected more than one million tons of contaminated water from cooling pipes used to prevent fuel cores from melting since the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

Japan’s environment Minister said Tuesday that the only way to deal with wastewater is to drain it into the sea.

“The only option would be to drain it into the sea and dilute it,” Yoshiaki Harada said at a briefing in Tokyo.

“The whole government will discuss it, but I would like to Express my simple opinion.”

Harada did not say how much water would need to be dumped into the ocean.

Disaster struck Japan (Photo: TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/Getty Images)

More than one million tons of contaminated water accumulated at Fukushima after the tsunami that caused the triple crisis eight years ago.

Water is in nearly 1,000 tanks at the facility, but officials at the plant have warned that it will run out of storage facilities by the summer of 2022.

The government is awaiting the report of the expert group before making a final decision on how to dispose of radioactive water.

Japan’s chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, in a separate press briefing, described Harada’s comments as “his personal opinion.”

Tepco has not been able to decide what to do but will follow the policy once the government has made a decision, a utility spokesman said.

Tanks are filling up (Photo: JAPAN POOL/AFP/Getty Images)

Any green light from the government to dump waste into the sea would anger neighbors such as South Korea, which summoned a senior Japanese Embassy official last month to explain how Fukushima waters would be treated.

“We just hope to hear more details about the discussions that are taking place in Tokyo so that there is no surprise announcement,” a South Korean diplomat who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue told Reuters.

The South Korean foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had asked Japan to ” make a wise and reasonable decision on this matter.”

Relations between the East Asian countries are already frosty after a dispute over compensation for Koreans forced to work in Japanese factories during world war II.

Coastal nuclear power plants typically discharge into ocean water that contains tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is difficult to separate and considered relatively harmless.

Tepco, which also faces opposition from fishermen, admitted last year that the water in its tanks still contains pollutants next to tritium.

“The government must commit to the only environmentally acceptable option to manage this water crisis, which is long-term storage and recycling to remove radioactivity, including tritium,” Sean Bernie, senior nuclear technology specialist at Greenpeace Germany, said in an email.

Additional reporting by Reuters 

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