nuclear-news

Japan’s prime minister has announced that the national government will move to take control of radiation containment and decommissioning of the crippled reactors, where leaks of highly radioactive water have now been confirmed, out of Tepco’s hands.

And that’s good news, in the sense that government teams could hardly do worse than Tepco in managing the situation. But the enormity of Fukushima’s problems is such that it’s fair to wonder how much difference — apart from perhaps greater transparency — this management change can make.

Here is a waste-disposal problem that is growing larger, not smaller, with the passage of time, and is now revealed to be plagued by leaks that have yet to be located or counted, let alone repaired.

Running out of room for tanks

Tepco’s mid-August acknowledgement that 300 tons of contaminated water had leaked into the Pacific Ocean from a storage tank at the plant site may not have seemed terribly alarming, at least initially. At Fukushima, contaminated water is being collected  at the rate of 400 tons every day. More alarming was the report on Saturday that leaking water has produced high radiation readings in the ground near the storage tanks. From a brief account in the New York Times:

Tepco said it had found the high levels of radiation at four separate spots on the ground, near some of the hundreds of tanks used to store toxic water produced by makeshift efforts to cool the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s three damaged reactors. The highest reading was 1,800 millisieverts per hour, or enough to give a lethal dose in about four hours, Tepco said……..

Japan’s rating of the new leaks as a level 3 incident on the international scale for severity of nuclear accidents is “an acknowledgment that the power station was at its greatest crisis since the reactors melted down after the tsunami in 2011. But some nuclear experts are concerned that the problem is a good deal worse than either Tepco or the Japanese government are willing to admit. “……..

In the meantime, according to the Guardian:

The leaks threaten to delay [Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s plans to restart nuclear reactors, a move he says is necessary to support Japan’s economic recovery and improve Tepco’s tattered finances.

Of Japan’s 50 working nuclear reactors, only two are in operation. One of those was to be shut down on Monday evening to undergo routine checks, the other will go offline on 15 September, leaving Japan without atomic energy for only the second time in almost 50 years.

http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2013/09/radiation-leaks-reported-fukushima-barely-hint-scope-problems-there