Fukushima buildings flooded with radioactive water

Latest incident involved 200 tons of contaminated water bound for treatment

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      Hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water have inundated building basements at Japan’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

      The paper quoted an April 14 announcement by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the crippled plant’s operator, that 200 tons of the contaminated water flooded into the basements after pumps were mistakenly turned on.

      The paper also reported that TEPCO said there was no danger of the water—used to cool reactors at the plant and containing several tens of millions of becquerels per litre of radioactive cesium—leaking from beneath the group of buildings that house the central waste-processing facilities.

      Pumps had to be manually operated

      On April 10, TEPCO said, workers noticed water levels that should have been receding were, instead, rising. Two days later, workers found four pumps in operation that were supposed to have been turned off. All the temporary pumps were turned off by 5 p.m. the following day, April 13.

      By that time, though, the 200 tons of radioactive water had flooded the basements. Because the pumps have to be manually operated, TEPCO said, it was investigating to determine whether or not workers were mistakenly operating the pumps.

      Latest in a series of leaks

      On February 26, TEPCO had to cease some decontamination work at Fukushima No. 1 when a pump that sent radioactive water to a treatment device shut down after an electric-system malfunction triggered an alarm.

      In another incident, reported by TEPCO on January 18, workers viewing a remote-controlled robot's video feed discovered a 30-centimetre-wide stream of water leaking into a drain from the first floor of the destroyed No. 3 reactor building, according to TEPCO. Radiation there measured 30 millisieverts per hour.

      On October 6, 2013, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said a worker doing systems inspections mistakenly pushed a button that cut power to parts of the four reactor buildings, shutting down pumps that supplied water to cool the damaged reactors.

      And in August last year, TEPCO admitted that up to 300 tons of highly contaminated groundwater from the site was seeping into the Pacific Ocean every day. The government said it could not rule out the chance that this leakage had been occurring on a daily basis since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused the triple meltdown.

      Days after that August revelation, TEPCO announced that a further 300 tons of highly contaminated water had breached a storage tank’s concrete-and-sandbag barrier and seeped into the ground. The plant operator said then that it didn’t know how the leak occurred or where the water went.

      Of the most recent incident, TEPCO said that there are no channels through which the contaminated water can exit the buildings’ basements.

       

      Comments

      3 Comments

      Noname

      Apr 15, 2014 at 10:04am

      What kind of idiots are working there??? Fact is the radioactivity reached the west coast of Northern America because since three years radioactve slop contmines the pacific, kills animals, plants and people.

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      Peter

      Apr 15, 2014 at 1:05pm

      They hire homeless people with zero experience and pay them less than minimum wage. What do you expect the result would be? Even now, people in Japan continue supporting nuclear energy. They will reactivate other nuclear plans.

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      jenn

      Apr 15, 2014 at 6:09pm

      japan cannot handle this on there own the whole world is going to be affected ....more counrtys need to step up and demand actions , japan your killing our ocean animal life and eventually everyone

      0 0Rating: 0