nuclear-news

Fukushima’s million-ton headache – radioactive water everywhere

Fukushima Nuclear Disaster 5 Years On: Water, Water Everywhere (Part I), Forbes, 
John Boyd , 7 Mar 16 “……….Now, on the fifth anniversary of what is known here as the Great East Japan Earthquake, how much progress has TEPCO and the government made in dealing with what was fundamentally a man-made disaster?

The answer is they continue to face the same four huge challenges they grappled with in 2011: dealing with contaminated water that has grown into a million-ton headache; locating and somehow retrieving the molten fuel debris; removing spent fuel rods from the damaged reactor storage pools; and disposing of millions of cubic meters of radioactive waste.

Most evident of these challenges is the contaminated water. Cooling water must be continuously circulated through the damaged reactors Units 1, 2 and 3, where nuclear fuel has melted through at least the inner containment vessels. Consequently, the cooling water injected into the reactor becomes contaminated and finds its way down into the turbine basements adjacent to each reactor; there, it mixes with incoming ground water to greatly compound the problem.

Some of the pooled water is partly decontaminated, cooled and recirculated through the reactors again, the rest is treated and pumped out and stored in tanks to prevent it flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s Chief Decommissioning Office, told the foreign press in Japan March 2^nd that there are over 1,000 such storage tanks located inside and outside the plant, each holding as much as 1,000 metric tons of treated water. And with groundwater streaming in at 150 metric tons a day, a new tank is being added weekly.

The stored water, while filtered and largely decontaminated, still contains tritium—radioactive hydrogen, which can cause cancer if ingested………http://www.forbes.com/sites/jboyd/2016/03/07/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-5-years-on-water-water-everywhere-part-i/#148a72ac1a35

March 9, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima 2016