Fukushima Water Wins Purity Award

Fukushima City in Japan announced this week that its bottled tap water was not only safe to drink, but it had just received a prestigious international award for quality. The city hopes the news will help allay fears of lingering radioactivity in the city's water following the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011 after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

According to Rocket News 24, Fukushima's tap water is bottled under the name Fukushima no Mizu, and this week the city announced that the bottled water had received a Gold Quality Award from the 2015 Monde Selection, an international competition that tests and awards the relative quality of different consumer products.

The mayor of Fukushima said in a press conference April 8 that people still mistrust the safety of Fukushima's water and fear radioactive contamination even though he pointed out that Fukushima's water has been routinely tested since the 2011 disaster, and since April 2011 the levels of the radioactive substance caesium iodide in Fukushima's water have not been higher than in the water in the rest of Japan. The mayor shared the news of the Monde Selection award and said he hopes it will help put fears of radioactive contamination in Fukushima to rest.