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Fukiashima radioactive water clean-up is 2 months behind schedule

Fukushima Watch: Tepco Two Months Behind on Cleaning Tainted Water http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/01/26/fukushima-watch-tepco-two-months-behind-on-cleaning-tainted-water/ By MARI IWATA Tokyo Electric Power Co. says it will need an additional two months to process all the highly contaminated water in storage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The power company previously said it would clean all the water by the end of March. A Tepco spokesman said Friday that the process had been slowed down by the need for workers to frequently clean the filters of the water processing system. He also said the system needed more initial adjustments than first expected when it came into use.

Tepco plans to give a more detailed outline of the water processing schedule in March, the spokesman said.

A large amount of groundwater keeps flowing underneath the reactors, creating about 300 to 400 tons a day of highly contaminated water. The water has been stored in about 1,000 tanks set up at the site.Tepco has been processing the water to remove most of the radioactive materials to reduce the contamination to a low level. The system is unable to remove tritium, a less harmful material.

The company now says it won’t finish processing the stored water until May. After that it will have sufficient capacity to deal with the daily inflows of groundwater.

January 26, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Fukushima 2015