Radioactive water leak recorded at Fukushima
Print Edition
Sensors at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water to the sea, the plant’s operator said yesterday, highlighting difficulties in decommissioning the crippled facility.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the sensors, which were rigged to a gutter that pours rain and ground water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a nearby bay, detected contamination levels up to 70 times greater than the already-high radioactive status seen at the plant campus.
TEPCO said its emergency inspections of tanks storing nuclear waste water did not find any additional abnormalities, but added that it had shut the gutter to prevent radioactive water from going into the Pacific Ocean.
The high levels of contamination were detected about 10am, with sensors showing radiation levels 50 to 70 times greater than usual, TEPCO said.
Though the levels have steadily fallen throughout the day, the same sensors were still showing contamination levels about 10 to 20 times more than usual, a company spokesman said.
It is not clear what caused the original spike or its fall, he said.
“With surveys of the plant and monitoring of other sensors, we have no reason to believe tanks storing radioactive wastewater have leaked,” he said.
The incident, one of several that have plagued the plant in recent months, reflects the difficulty in controlling and decommissioning the plant, which went through meltdowns and explosions after being hit by a giant tsunami in March 2011, sparking the world’s worst nuclear disaster in a generation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency recently said TEPCO has made “significant progress” in cleaning up the plant, but suggested that Japan should consider ways to discharge treated wastewater into the sea as a relatively safer way to deal with the radioactive water crisis.
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