Tokyo Electric Power Co’s plan to manage radioactive water at its wrecked Fukushima plant may include a controlled discharge into the ocean once its toxicity is brought within legal limits, Japan’s nuclear regulator said.
Nuclear Regulatory Authority Chairman Shunichi Tanaka said today the ocean dump could be necessary as the country’s government prepares to present its plan for handling tainted water at the site that’s increasing by 400 tons a day.
Managing the water used to cool melted fuel at the Fukushima plant’s reactors has become a fundamental challenge for the utility known as Tepco, which has recently struggled to contain a series of leaks that included the loss of about 300 tons of contaminated water that it reported two weeks ago.
“It is important for us to understand the need to make difficult judgments in order to avoid larger problems in the future,” Tanaka said of the possible ocean discharge during a speech to reporters in Tokyo.
Contaminant levels must be brought below accepted limits through filtration or other treatments before the water is dumped, he said.
Japan’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters could present its comprehensive response to the water management crisis as early as tomorrow, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said today, relaying comments made by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga to lawmakers earlier.
The government wants to present a “complete package” of steps to tackle the problem of contaminated water at the Fukushima plant, Suga said, according to Kato.
Leak management
Tepco’s challenge was further illustrated yesterday when the utility said it had found a new radioactive leak, capping its worst month since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused reactors to meltdown.
The company said it had halted the contaminated water leak from a pipe near an area of high radiation levels discovered on Aug. 31. Of the hot spots found over the weekend, one recorded radiation of 1,800 millisieverts per hour around the bottom of a bolted-flange tank storing water used to cool melted reactor cores. That’s 18 times the level reported at the same spot on Aug. 22, Tepco said.
With more than 338,000 metric tons of water with varying levels of toxicity stored in pits, basements and hundreds of tanks at the Fukushima plant, Tepco has been overwhelmed in trying to contain leaks.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month said Tepco isn’t able to handle the disaster recovery after the company acknowledged that contaminated groundwater at the plant was seeping into the ocean. Japanese government officials estimated that leak at 300 tons of irradiated water a day.
