South Korean shoppers are snapping up sea salt and other items as worry grows about their safety with Japan due to dump more than 1 million metric tons of treated radioactive water from a wrecked nuclear power plant into the sea.

The water was mainly used to cool damaged reactors at the Fukushima power plant north of Tokyo, after it was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

The release of the water from huge storage tanks into the Pacific is expected soon, though no date has been set.