Growing volumes of radioactive water entering the ocean from Fukushima nuclear plant

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said officials were growing concerned about the sheer volume of radioactive materials spilling into the Pacific. It is not clear how much water has leaked in addition to what is being dumped purposely…….”Even if they say the contamination will be diluted in the ocean, the longer this continues, the more radioactive particles will be released and the greater the impact on the ocean,..”

Japan nuke plant dumps radioactive water into sea – seattlepi.com, MARI YAMAGUCHI, YURI KAGEYAMA, April 4, 2011“………More water keeps pooling because TEPCO has been forced to rely on makeshift methods of bringing down temperatures and pressure by pumping water into the reactors and allowing it to gush out wherever it can. It is a messy process, but it is preventing a full meltdown of the fuel rods that would release even more radioactivity into the environment.
We must keep putting water into the reactors to cool to prevent further fuel damage, even though we know that there is a side effect, which is the leakage,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear Safety and Industrial Agency. “We want to get rid of the stagnant water and decontaminate the place so that we can return to our primary task to restore the sustainable cooling capacity as quickly as possible.”

Engineers have been using unusual methods to try to stop the more highly radioactive water leaking into the sea.

They thought it was coming from a crack in a maintenance pit they discovered Saturday, but an attempt to seal the crack with concrete failed, and clogging it with a special polymer mixed with sawdust and shredded newspapers didn’t work, either.

They dumped milky white bath salts into the system around the pit Monday to try to figure out the source of the leak, but it never splashed out into the ocean.

In the meantime, workers plan to install screens made of polyester fabric to try to stop some of the contamination in the ocean from spreading. Although the government eventually authorized the dumping of the less-radioactive water, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said officials were growing concerned about the sheer volume of radioactive materials spilling into the Pacific. It is not clear how much water has leaked in addition to what is being dumped purposely.

Even if they say the contamination will be diluted in the ocean, the longer this continues, the more radioactive particles will be released and the greater the impact on the ocean,” Edano said. “We are strongly urging TEPCO that they have to take immediate action to deal with this.”…..

Japan nuke plant dumps radioactive water into sea – seattlepi.com