300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant

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300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant

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.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/asia/300-tons-of-contaminated-water-leak-from-japanese-nuclear-plant.html?_r=0

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Re: 300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant

Wrecked Fukushima storage tank leaking highly radioactive water

By Yoko Kubota and Yuka Obayashi

TOKYO | Tue Aug 20, 2013 10:26am EDT

TOKYO (Reuters) - Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the cleanup of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The storage tank breach of about 300 metric tons of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday.

The latest leak is so contaminated that a person standing half a meter (1 ft 8 inches) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers.

After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells.

"That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse," said Michiaki Furukawa, who is professor emeritus at Nagoya University and a nuclear chemist.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/us-japan-fukushima-leak-idUSBRE97J02920130820

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Re: 300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant

Japan may upgrade radioactive water leak at Fukushima to 'serious incident'

Published August 21, 2013
FoxNews.com

Japan is taking the leakage of radioactive water at the Fukushima nuclear power plant seriously, its watchdog said Wednesday, proposing raising the rating to describe it as a "serious incident" rather than "an anomaly."

The operator of the plant said about 80,000 gallons, or 300,000 liters, of contaminated water has leaked from one of hundreds of steel tanks around the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. Tokyo Electric Power Co. hasn't figured out how or where the water leaked, but suspects it did so through a seam on the tank or a valve connected to a gutter around the tank.

The watchdog, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, proposed at a weekly meeting Wednesday to raise the rating of the leak to Level 3 from an earlier Level 1 on an International Nuclear and Radiological event scale of 0 to 8. The watchdog, however, plans to consult with the U.N. nuclear regulatory agency over whether it is appropriate to use the INES evaluation scale on the badly wrecked Fukushima plant.

TEPCO said that because the tank is about 330 feet from the coastline, the leak does not pose an immediate threat to the sea. But Hideka Morimoto, a watchdog spokesman, said water could reach the sea via a drain gutter.
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Workers were pumping out the puddle and the remaining water in the tank and will transfer it to other containers, in a desperate effort to prevent it from escaping into the sea ahead of heavy rain predicted later in the day around Fukushima. By Tuesday afternoon they had captured only about 1,000 gallons, or 4,000 liters, Ono said.

The water's radiation level, measured about 2 feet above the puddle, was about 100 millisieverts per hour -- the maximum cumulative exposure allowed for plant workers over five years, Ono said.
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Ono said the latest leak was by far the worst from a steel storage tank in terms of volume. The previous four cases involved leakages of only up to 2.5 gallons.

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http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/21/japan-to-upgrade-radioactive-water-leak-at-fukushima-to-serious-incident/#ixzz2ccEL6gnD