300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant

[Marty M]

300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant
​https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/w...lant.html?_r=0
By HIROKO TABUCHI

Published: August 20, 2013

TOKYO — Three hundred tons of highly contaminated water have leaked from a storage tank at the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s Pacific Coast, its operator said on Tuesday, raising further concerns over the site’s safety and prompting regulators to declare a radiological release incident for the first time since disaster struck there in 2011.

Workers raced to place sandbags around the leak at the site to stem the spread of the water, a task made more urgent by a forecast of heavy rain for the Fukushima region later in the day. A spokesman at Tokyo Electric Power, the plant’s operator, acknowledged that much of the contaminated water had seeped into the soil and could eventually reach the ocean, adding to the tons of radioactive fluids that have already leaked into the sea from the troubled plant.


The leaked water contains levels of radioactive cesium and strontium many hundreds of times higher than legal safety limits, Tokyo Electric said. Exposure to either element is known to increase the risk of cancer.
The company said it had not determined the source of the leak.
“We must prevent the contaminated water from dispersing further due to rain and are piling up more sandbags,” said Masayuki Ono, a spokesman for the operator, also known as Tepco. But he also said much of the water has been absorbed into the soil, and workers would need to try to remove some of the soil using shovel cars and other heavy machinery.
Tepco has acknowledged in recent weeks that leaks of radioactive runoff at the site, about 150 miles north of Tokyo, are at crisis levels. The runoff comes from cooling water that workers are pumping into the damaged cores of the site’s three most damaged reactors, as well as from groundwater pouring into the breached basements of those reactors.
Some of that runoff has been seeping into the ocean since the accident at the site in 2011, triggered by a powerful earthquake and a 14-meter tsunami. To reduce the leaks, Tepco has started pumping out some of the contaminated water and storing it in almost 1,000 large tanks it has built on the debris-strewn site.
Tepco hopes to start cleansing the water using an elaborate filtering system and start releasing low-level contaminated water into the ocean. Those plans have been delayed by technical problems and protests from local fishermen.
Desperate for options, Japan’s nuclear regulator has suggested surrounding the plant with a huge underground ice wall to stem any leaks. That plan has its own drawbacks, however, and would require huge amounts of electricity almost indefinitely.
The latest leak comes from one of the site’s 1,000 tanks, about 500 yards inland, Tepco said. Workers discovered puddles of radioactive water near the tank on Monday. Further checks revealed that the 1,000-ton capacity vessel, thought to be nearly full, only contained 700 tons, with the remainder having almost certainly leaked out.
There had been concerns raised among some experts over the durability of the tanks. Mr. Ono said that Tepco had assumed the tanks would last at least five years, but the latest leak comes less than two years after the company started installing the storage vessels at the site to deal with the growing amounts of runoff.
“It is going to be very difficult and dangerous for Tepco to keep on storing all this water,” said Hiroshi Miyano, an expert in nuclear system design at Hosei University in Tokyo. He said, for example, that another strong earthquake or tsunami could destroy the tanks and lead to a huge spill.
At some point, Tepco will have no choice but to start releasing some of the water into the ocean after cleaning it, Dr. Miyano said. The continued mishaps at the site have heightened public scrutiny of Tepco and made it more difficult to build public consensus around any release of water, he said.
“That just makes the problem worse, with no viable solution,” he said.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority described the leak as a Level 1 incident, the lowest level, on a global scale that rates radiological releases. This was the first time that Japan had declared a radiological event since earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, which was rated at Level 7, the highest on that scale and on par with the 1986 accident at Chernobyl.
In a statement, the regulator ordered Tepco to do its utmost to identify the exact source of the leak, to step up radiation monitoring at the site and to remove contaminated soil. Tepco said it would do its best to comply.
Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

[handy]

And from cooler heads....

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/0...nothing_again/

Oh noes! New 'CRISIS DISASTER' at Fukushima! Oh wait, it's nothing. Again

But hey, let's soil ourselves repeatedly anyway

By Lewis Page, 21st August 2013

124

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The world's media is working itself into an unedifying state of hysteria (again) following the news that radioactive water has leaked from a holding tank at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, damaged two years back by a tsunami and earthquake which led to the death and injury of more than 20,000 people - though not a single one of those casualties resulted from radiation.
However the frightful death toll which actually happened was pretty much ignored by the world's media, which chose to focus on non-existent dangers that might have resulted from radioactive material escaping from the damaged reactors at Fukushima. In the end, the nuclear apocalypse failed to appear - the scientific consensus is that absolutely no health effects due to the Fukushima radiation will ever be detectable - and the journalists reluctantly gave up.



But now they're back. We hear from Reuters today:

Japan's NUCLEAR CRISIS escalated to its WORST LEVEL since a massive earthquake and tsunami CRIPPLED the Fukushima plant more than two years ago ... nearby China said it was "SHOCKED" ... the DISASTER - the WORST nuclear accident since Chernobyl a quarter of a century earlier ... Water in the latest leak is so CONTAMINATED that a person standing close to it for an hour would receive FIVE TIMES the annual recommended limit for nuclear workers.

[Our caps. Just trying to help.]
'Nuclear crisis' - 'disaster' - FIVE TIMES the annual recommended limit? Surely this is it at last? The disaster is finally happening!
Well, no. The situation is this. The melted-down cores at the damaged reactors (the site is not "crippled", two reactors were undamaged and will return to service) are still hot - though much less hot than they were two years ago - and need to be cooled. This is done by pumping water through their buildings, then sucking it out again and putting it into holding tanks before purifying it to remove the radiation it picks up from the cores. Then it gets used again.
What has happened is that one of the holding tanks, containing water that had only been through one stage of purification, has sprung a leak and about 300,000 litres of water has got out. Almost all of this was contained by a backup dam which had been built around the tanks when they were set up (this is the nuclear industry, there is always a backup). However, "two shallow puddles" of the water got out of the dam via a rainwater drain valve which has since been sealed off.
The water is quite radioactive, and dose rates measured next to the puddles were 100 milliSieverts per hour. Nuclear powerplant workers, whose cancer rate is somewhat lower than in the general population (probably because they don't smoke so much) are allowed to sustain 50 millisievert in any one year in normal times and average doses across five years of 20 millisievert/yr.
However what Reuters haven't picked up on is that the high 100 milliSievert reading is for beta radiation only. The reading for gamma rays is only 1.5 milliSieverts per hour.
As we no doubt all recall from skool, beta radiation is not very penetrating: it can't get through human skin and it only travels a few feet through air. So you'd have to stand very close indeed to the two puddles, in them probably, for their beta rays even to reach you. A sturdy pair of wellingtons would have a good protective effect, if you should do this. As far as beta radiation is concerned, the only ways to seriously harm yourself with that water would be to get it on your exposed skin and leave it there for some time, or to drink it. This is also true of many domestic cleaning products.
The gamma hazard is noticeable, you wouldn't want to take up residence next to the pool of water, but you could work for days around it without breaching normal nuclear-worker health limits and the crews in the vicinity are being rotated regularly. Tepco is pumping all the water back into another tank pending purification, and segregating wet soil from the area. The firm told WNN that it has no indication so far of any water having got into a drainage channel or otherwise left the area.
So this is a pretty minor industrial-waste spill; thousands of more serious accidents occur every single day.
It's not global news. It's not national news. It would barely even be local news, in a sane world.
But it's not a sane world, and the media crusade against nuclear power rolls on. ®

[Sara S]

Here's some interesting visuals (from my friend Jim McCrumb):

https://www.zerohedge.com/contribute...hima-radiation

[Sasha Monique]

There are a lot of interesting perspectives out there. Over 300 people joined the Global Focus on Fukushima event on Facebook to share information and discuss what is happening and why it is not being covered by more mainstream media. There is evidence that the crisis in Fukushima has only begun. It may take an international effort to contain the leak of 300 tons of radiation/day, help to fix the crippled nuclear plant and initiate testing of food and remediation for the 280,000 tons of radiation that has leaked into the Pacific in the past two and a half years.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of it here. I recommend everyone do their own research and decide whether this issue is worthy of a response or something to ignore.


https://schockweiler.blogspot.com/20...th-is-out.html

In a nutshell:
The Fukushima power plant is leaking unstoppably for the next decades from many ends, with the highest amount of radioactivity ever measured. The sheer amount and speed in which it is dispersed into the Pacific ocean and starts pollution the environment and food chain (P.S: Bluefin tuna in Californian Waters are already spiking high amounts of radioactive isotopes) is leading towards the biggest man-made environmental disaster which could lead to millions of casulties.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23779561

"What is the worse is the water leakage everywhere else - not just from the tanks. It is leaking out from the basements, it is leaking out from the cracks all over the place. Nobody can measure that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/w...=fb-share&_r=0

Three hundred tons of highly contaminated water has leaked from a storage tank at the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s Pacific coast, its operator said Tuesday, prompting regulators to declare a “radiological release incident” for the first time since disaster struck there in 2011 and adding new fears of environmental calamity.

This site has some very clear visuals and explanations.

https://fukushimaresponse.org/Home.html

Here's some interesting visuals (from my friend Jim McCrumb):

https://www.zerohedge.com/contribute...hima-radiation

[podfish]

you can't fool me. I saw Godzilla when I was a kid. I know the real risks.

[tomcat]

It just keeps getting worse!

Fukushima apocalypse: Years of ‘duct tape fixes’ could result in ‘millions of deaths’

Published time: August 17, 2013 13:15
Edited time: August 18, 2013 13:41 Get short URL


Damaged Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) number 1 daiichi nuclear power plant at Okuma town in Fukushima prefecture (AFP Photo)


Even the tiniest mistake during an operation to extract over 1,300 fuel rods at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan could lead to a series of cascading failures with an apocalyptic outcome, fallout researcher Christina Consolo told RT.
Fukushima operator TEPCO wants to extract 400 tons worth of spent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s damaged Reactor No. 4. The removal would have to be done manually from the top store of the damaged building in the radiation-contaminated environment.

In the worst-case scenario, a mishandled rod may go critical, resulting in an above-ground meltdown releasing radioactive fallout with no way to stop it, said Consolo, who is the founder and host of Nuked Radio. But leaving the things as they are is not an option, because statistical risk of a similarly bad outcome increases every day, she said.

[tomcat]

TEPCO admits leakage of 300 tons of water with monstrous radiation level

Published time: August 20, 2013 07:55
Edited time: August 20, 2013 12:36 Get short URL


An aerial view shows workers wearing protective suits and masks work at a construction site (C) of the shore barrier to stop radioactive water from leaking into the sea, at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima (Reuters / Kyodo)


Another tank with highly radioactive water at the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant has leaked, reported operator TEPCO. The contaminated water contains an unprecedented 80 million Becquerels of radiation per liter. The norm is a mere 150 Bq.

Follow RT's LIVE UPDATES on the Fukushima leak emergency

A spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said on Tuesday that 300 tons of highly radioactive water has leaked from a stainless steel tank on the territory of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has classified the leak as a Level One incident, the second lowest on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) for radiological releases, a spokesman informed Reuters.

The incident is the first Level One since the actual catastrophe at Fukushima in March 2011 when Japanese authorities issued an INES rating.

Level One means that the incident is classified as anomalous situation that exceeds limits of safe functioning of an installation. The most dangerous, Level Seven, has only been applied twice: for the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima plant itself.

[tomcat]

New radioactive hotspots suggest more leaks at Fukushima

Published time: September 01, 2013 01:30
Edited time: September 01, 2013 04:11 Get short URL



Japan's Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi (R), wearing a protective suit and a mask, inspects contaminated water tanks at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture August 26, 2013, in this photo released by Kyodo. (Reuters/Kyodo)

Several new hotspots reading potentially lethal doses of radiation have been detected near the tanks storing the radioactive water, forcing the operator to admit there might be even more leaks at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

More here: https://rt.com/news/fukushima-radiat...-possible-264/