The Malta Independent on Sunday
Japan nuke plant water wo orries rise
Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant is struggling to find space to store tens of thousands of tons of highly contaminated water used to cool the broken reactors, the manager of the water treatment team said.
About 200,000 tons of radioactive water — enough to fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools — are being stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks built around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. Operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. has already chopped down trees to make room for more tanks and predicts the volume of water will more than triple within three years.
“It’s a pressing issue because our land is limited and we would eventually run out of storage space,” the water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview this week.
TEPCO is close to running a new treatment system that could make the water safe enough to release into the ocean. But in the meantime its tanks are filling up — mostly because leaks in reactor facilities are allowing ground water pour in.
Outside experts worry that if contaminated water is released, there will be lasting impact on the environment. And they fear that because of the reactor leaks and water flowing from one part of the plant to another, that may already be hap- pening.
Nuclear engineer and college lecturer Masashi Goto said the contaminated water buildup poses a long-term health and environmental threat. He worries that the radioactive water in the basements may already be getting into the underground water system, where it could reach far beyond the plant, possibly the ocean or public water supplies.
“You never know where it’s leaking out and once it’s out you can never put it back in place,” he said. “It’s just outrageous and shows how big a disaster the accident is.”
The concerns are less severe than the nightmare scenario TEPCO faced in the weeks after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami knocked out power an tems at the plant, lea sions and meltdow reactor cores in the nuclear disaster sinc The plant released rad surrounding air, soil displaced more than dents who are uncert if — they will be ab their homes.
and cooling sysading to explowns of three world’s worst nce Chernobyl. diation into the and ocean and n 100,000 resitain when — or ble to return to
Dumping massive amounts of water into the melting reactors was the only way to avoid an even bigger catastrophe.
Okamura remembers frantically trying to find a way to get water to spent fuel pools located on the highest floor of the 50-meter-high reactor buildings. Without water, the spent fuel likely would have overheated and melted, sending radioactive smoke for miles and affecting possibly millions of people.
“The water would keep evaporating, and the pools would have dried up if we had left them alone,” he said. “That would have been the end of it.”
Attempts to dump water from helicopters were ineffective. Spraying water from fire trucks into the pools didn’t work either. Okamura then helped bring in a huge, Germanmade concrete-making pump with a remote-controlled arm that was long enough to spray water into the fuel pools.
The plan worked — just in time, Okamura said.
Those measures and others helped bring the plant under tenuous control, but it will take decades to clean up the radioactive material. And those desperate steps created another huge headache for the utility: What to do with all that radioactive water that leaked out of the damaged reactors and collected in the basements of reactor buildings and nearby facilities.