Radioactive
cesium level soars 90-fold at Fukushima in just 3 days
Levels
of radioactive cesium-134 in a well at Fukushima nuclear power plant
are up to 90 times higher than just three days ago, and may spread
into the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, 10 applications to restart
reactors under stricter rules have been received.
RT,
9
July, 2013
TEPCO,
the company that operated the plant and is now in charge of the
cleanup and decommissioning, said that cesium-134 levels in the well
water were at 9,000 becquerels per liter, 150 times the legal level.
While cesium-137 measured 18,000 becquerels, 200 times the permitted
level.
Cesium-137
has a half-life of 30 years and the readings were some 85 times
higher than they had been three days earlier.
These
are the highest cesium levels found since the March 2011 disaster.
“It
is unclear whether the radioactive water is leaking into the sea.
After gathering needed data, we will conduct analyses,” a TEPCO
official told the Japanese media.
Although
the total levels of cesium collected on July 8 were far higher than
those collected just three days earlier on July 5, levels of other
radioactive materials, such as strontium, remained the same as three
days ago.
“We
do not know why only cesium levels have risen,” a TEPCO spokesman
said.
The
latest findings, just 25 meters from the Pacific Ocean, were made
just a month after TEPCO detected cesium in the groundwater flowing
from high ground fairly far from the sea into its destroyed plant.
The
spike, along with discoveries of other radioactive elements like
Tritium and Strontium, suggest that contaminated water is spreading
towards the sea from the reactors, which are on higher ground.
It
was reported in June that very high levels of strontium 90 were found
in groundwater near the stricken plant, but TEPCO officials insisted
that it had not leaked into the nearby ocean.
Engineers
have been flushing water over the reactors for more than two years to
keep them cool, but contaminated water has been building up at the
rate of an Olympic sized swimming pool every week and TEPCO is
running out of space to store it.
It
has applied to channel groundwater, which it says has low levels of
radioactive contamination, around the plant and into the sea. Local
fishermen have opposed the proposal.
The
findings in one of four wells dug by TEPCO at Fukushima since May 24,
2013, come just days after new safety rules came into force designed
to avoid a repeat of the disaster and allow Japan to restart it
nuclear power stations.
At
present only two of Japan’s 50 reactors are connected to the grid,
but the government is forging ahead with plans to reopen them, in the
face of a skeptical public and rising imported fossil fuel bills to
run conventional power stations.
“Some
of the units are projected to [restart] one year from now, though I
don’t know how many,” Kenzo Oshima a commissioner at Japan’s
Nuclear Radiation Authority, told Reuters.
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