Japan has approved a plan to release more than one million tonnes of contaminated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.
The water will be treated and diluted so radiation levels are below those set for drinking water.
But the local fishing industry has strongly opposed the move, as have China and South Korea.
Tokyo says work to release water used to cool nuclear fuel will begin in about two years.
The final approval comes after years of debate and is expected to take decades to complete.
Currently, the radioactive water is treated in a complex filtration process that removes most of the radioactive elements, but some remain, including tritium – deemed harmful to humans only in very large doses.
It is then kept in huge tanks, but the plant’s operator Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of space, with these tanks expected to fill up by 2022.
