Mainstream media reports on Fukushima

'Worst-case scenario' at Fukushima

The Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority said the cascading series of radioactive water leaks from the Fukushima plant is approaching a worst case scenario.

UPI,

21 August, 2013

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, this week confirmed about 79,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked from a storage tank. It warned there may be hundreds more tanks like it on the site of the 2011 meltdown.

Chairman of the Japan Nuclear Regulation Authority Shunichi Tanaka was quoted Thursday by The Wall Street Journal as saying the situation was alarming.

"We cannot waste even a minute," he said. "This is what we have been fearing."

The nuclear watchdog raised the alert level to 3, a serious incident, this week. The meltdown itself was categorized as a level 7 nuclear event, the highest level.

Tepco said Wednesday it was running out of space to store the 105,000 gallons of radioactive water pumped out of contaminated reactors each day.

The utility company said water hasn't yet reached the waters surrounding the facility.

Atsunao Marui, director of research at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, said the situation is likely to get worse.

"It's important to think of the worst-case scenario," he said.

Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

A nuclear expert has told the BBC that he believes the current water leaks at Fukushima are much worse than the authorities have stated.

BBC,

22 August, 2013

Mycle Schneider is an independent consultant who has previously advised the French and German governments.

He says water is leaking out all over the site and there are no accurate figures for radiation levels.

Meanwhile the chairman of Japan's nuclear authority said that he feared there would be further leaks.

The ongoing problems at the Fukushima plant increased in recent days when the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) admitted that around 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank on the site.

Moment of crisis

The Japanese nuclear energy watchdog raised the incident level from one to three on the international scale that measures the severity of atomic accidents.

This was an acknowledgement that the power station was in its greatest crisis since the reactors melted down after the tsunami in 2011.

But some nuclear experts are concerned that the problem is a good deal worse than either Tepco or the Japanese government are willing to admit.

They are worried about the enormous quantities of water, used to cool the reactor cores, which are now being stored on site.

Some 1,000 tanks have been built to hold the water. But these are believed to be at around 85% of their capacity and every day an extra 400 tonnes of water are being added.

"The quantities of water they are dealing with are absolutely gigantic," said Mycle Schneider, who has consulted widely for a variety of organisations and countries on nuclear issues.

"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.

"It is much worse than we have been led to believe, much worse," said Mr Schneider, who is lead author for the World Nuclear Industry status reports.

At news conference, the head of Japan's nuclear regulation authority Shunichi Tanaka appeared to give credence to Mr Schneider's concerns, saying that he feared there would be further leaks.

``We should assume that what has happened once could happen again, and prepare for more. We are in a situation where there is no time to waste," he told reporters.

The lack of clarity about the water situation and the continued attempts by Tepco to deny that water was leaking into the sea has irritated many researchers.

Dr Ken Buesseler is a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has examined the waters around Fukushima.

"It is not over yet by a long shot, Chernobyl was in many ways a one week fire-explosive event, nothing with the potential of this right on the ocean."

"We've been saying since 2011 that the reactor site is still leaking whether that's the buildings and the ground water or these new tank releases. There's no way to really contain all of this radioactive water on site."

"Once it gets into the ground water, like a river flowing to the sea, you can't really stop a ground water flow. You can pump out water, but how many tanks can you keep putting on site?"

Several scientists also raised concerns about the vulnerability of the huge amount of stored water on site to another earthquake.

Water from the storage tanks has seeped into the groundwater and then into the sea. Efforts to use a chemical barrier to prevent sea contamination have not worked.

New health concerns

The storage problems are compounded by the ingress of ground water, running down from the surrounding hills. It mixes with radioactive water leaking out of the basements of the reactors and then some of it leaches into the sea, despite the best efforts of Tepco to stem the flow.

Some of the radioactive elements like caesium that are contained in the water can be filtered by the earth. Others are managing to get through and this worries watching experts.

"Our biggest concern right now is if some of the other isotopes such as strontium 90 which tend to be more mobile, get through these sediments in the ground water," said Dr Buesseler.

"They are entering the oceans at levels that then will accumulate in seafood and will cause new health concerns."

There are also worries about the spent nuclear fuel rods that are being cooled and stored in water pools on site. Mycle Schneider says these contain far more radioactive caesium than was emitted during the explosion at Chernobyl.

"There is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't a crack in the walls of the spent fuel pools. If salt water gets in, the steel bars would be corroded. It would basically explode the walls, and you cannot see that; you can't get close enough to the pools," he said.

The "worsening situation" at Fukushima has prompted a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland to call for the withdrawal of Tokyo's Olympic bid.

In a letter to the UN secretary general, Mitsuhei Murata says the official radiation figures published by Tepco cannot be trusted. He says he is extremely worried about the lack of a sense of crisis in Japan and abroad.

This view is shared by Mycle Schneider, who is calling for an international taskforce for Fukushima.

"The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it."

New radiation readings suggest more Fukushima tank leaks

Excessive radiation levels have been detected next to the vast storage tanks containing the highly-contaminated water used to cool reactors at the damaged Fukushima power plant. One such tank already leaked earlier this week.

RT,

22 August, 2013

The announcement was made by Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which began to check its 300 storage tanks after 300 tons of contaminated water escaped from one of them on Wednesday.

The contaminated water that leaked on Wednesday contains an unprecedented 80 million Becquerels of radiation per liter, according to the company. The norm is a mere 150 Bq.

The puddle that formed around the damaged tank is emitting radiation of 100 Millisieverts per hour, as a probe has been taken about half a meter from the water, reported Kyodo News. The traces of radioactivity were detected in a drainage stream.

“We have finished pumping out water from the troubled tank, while we have continued removing the soil soaked by the water,” Numajiri said. “We cannot rule out the possibility that part of the contaminated water flowed into the sea.”

Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) commissioners raised the severity of the latest Fukushima leak to Level Three, which is considered a ‘serious radiation incident’ on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) for radiological releases. The alert was raised from Level One, which indicates an ‘anomaly’. Level Seven is the most dangerous radiation status.

"Judging from the amount and the density of the radiation in the contaminated water that leaked ... a Level 3 assessment is appropriate," said the document used during Wednesday’s weekly meeting of the NRA.

NRA Chairman Shunichi Tanaka on Wednesday voiced concern that there could be similar leaks from other containers.

“We must carefully deal with the problem on the assumption that if one tank springs a leak the same thing can happen at other tanks,” he said.

One of the main difficulties for TEPCO in handling the nuclear plant damaged in 2011 Tsunami is what to do with the water used to cool the reactor. The liquid is stored in some 1,000 reactors.

Since the melted cores of the three destroyed reactors have burnt through the concrete basement of the reactor zone, radioactive water is seeping into the surrounding soil.

In July, TEPCO reported officially for the first time that the radioactive groundwater had been leaking outside the plant, which is located close to the Pacific coast.

Radioactive water leaking from Fukushima plant

CNN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y5SZKsndqTU



"The short-term solution is storage. There is no long-term solution"

How Long Will Fukushima Be ALLOWED To Continue Dumping Radiation Into The Pacific Ocean?

NHK News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKp5uKctv_s&feature=c4-overview&list=UUP59nN5G3HIM2hKC_jxP3Uw

Japan Races To Contain Worst Fukushima Spill Since Meltdown

Wall Street Journal,

22 August, 2013

TOKYO—Japan is scrambling to contain its worst spill of contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant since its meltdown more than two years ago, drawing fresh scrutiny to what experts say remains its shortsighted handling of the site.

On Wednesday, Japan's nuclear watchdog declared that the plant had suffered a "serious incident"—level "3" on an international scale—after operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. 9501.TO +2.43% said that some 300 metric tons, or 79,000 gallons, of highly radioactive water had leaked from a hastily built storage tank and warned that roughly 300 more of the potentially leaky tanks existed. It was the first declaration of a nuclear incident in Japan since regulators classed the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant a level "7"—the highest—in 2011.

Radioactive water seeped from one of some 300 quickly built tanks, Tepco said this week. Leaks in underground storage pools had forced Tepco to move the water above ground.

"This is what we have been fearing," said Shunichi Tanaka, chair of Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority, answering questions about the leak at a news conference. "We cannot waste even a minute" to take action.

Behind the leak is a more serious problem: During the past few months it has become clear that Tepco has lost control over the flow of water at the plant and that the problem is escalating, nuclear experts say.

Every day, the utility has to find a place to store around 400 tons of contaminated water that it pumps out of the radioactive reactor buildings, and Wednesday it warned that it is fast running out of space. Storage tanks set up on the fly during plant emergencies have started springing leaks, and Tepco can't replace them with sturdier ones fast enough. Groundwater-contamination levels are spiking at the seaward side of the plant, and water is flowing into the ocean past a series of walls, plugs and barriers that have been flung up to impede its passage.

That lack of control is a big liability, said Kathryn Higley, a specialist in the spread of radiation and head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State University, who spent a week in Fukushima earlier this year.

"You have to find ways to control water coming through the site," Ms. Higley said. "With any sort of accident, you want to control the timing of what's released and when it gets released."

So far, the levels of radioactivity that have escaped to the outside remain relatively low, but some experts warn they may not stay that way—particularly as equipment ages and the heavy-duty work of dismantling the damaged buildings and removing the melted fuel rods proceeds. The radioactivity of the water in the most recent leak was so high that workers couldn't get close enough to search for the cause until the remaining fluid in the tank was removed.

Tepco said it doesn't think that water has flowed into the sea but can't say for sure. Some of the flooded reactor basements are similarly too hot to approach, and it is still not clear where the melted fuel cores are, or in what state.

"In the future there might be even more heavily contaminated water coming through," said Atsunao Marui, head of the groundwater research group at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and a member of a blue-ribbon panel set up in May to figure out ways of managing the radioactive water. "It's important to think of the worst-case scenario."

Mr. Marui and others say the biggest reason for the scramble now is that Tepco—and the government bodies that oversee it—weren't planning far enough ahead and waited too long to respond to problems they should have seen coming long ago.

Fukushima Daiichi was built some 40 years ago on the site of a river that was diverted in order to situate the plant, Mr. Marui says. It should have been clear that lots of groundwater would be rushing through the site, he says, and that any walls or barriers built on the seaward side would soon be overwhelmed—something that, indeed, has happened in recent weeks.

"They're only responding after the fact—they're not thinking ahead," said Hajimu Yamana, a professor of nuclear engineering at Kyoto University who earlier this month was named chair of a new institute charged with helping develop measures to tackle the longer-term work of dismantling the plant. "As an expert, I was watching it with frustration."

Tepco says it is changing its ways, while the government and nuclear regulator have set up three separate committees of experts charged with helping fix Fukushima Daiichi's water problems. Those fixes have included everything from a plan to drain highly radioactive water from a set of trenches near the sea to a massive wall of ice that would surround the damaged reactors and keep water out. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier this month promised money and resources to help.

But even with the extra firepower, Tepco and its helpers are playing catch-up, and critics say response remains confused, shortsighted and slow.

"We have not remained idle, but we admit that we have been reactive," Zengo Aizawa, Tepco executive vice president for nuclear public relations, said at a news conference Wednesday, during which the company was grilled about the leak. "We are very, very sorry for causing concern."

Tatsuya Shinkawa, director of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Nuclear Accident Response Office said METI, which oversees Tepco, should have been faster at figuring out how quickly the situation at Fukushima Daiichi was changing in recent months.

This aerial view photo taken Tuesday shows the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and its contaminated water storage tanks at bottom.

Although Tepco had been struggling to contain contaminated water since the March 2011 accident, when a massive earthquake and tsunami knocked out power at the plant and caused the three active reactors to melt down, the problems there came into focus again this April. That is when three vast underground storage pools for contaminated water were found to have sprung leaks, forcing Tepco to move tens of thousands of tons of radioactive water to tanks above ground.

METI decided it had better take a hard look at the utility's plans to control water at Fukushima Daiichi, Mr. Shinkawa said.

What it found, he said, is that Tepco's plans had already fallen behind the situation on the ground. Tepco estimates that around 1,000 tons of groundwater flow through the site every day, some 400 tons of which goes into the radioactive reactor buildings. It is mixed with another 400 tons injected daily to keep the melted fuel cores cool. The company was pumping out that water every day, recycling half and putting the other half in storage, while it hurried to figure out ways of keeping the groundwater from getting contaminated in the first place, Tepco and government officials said.

But one project—which called for diverting water to the sea before it could hit the contaminated buildings by pumping it out from a string of wells on the landward side of the site—hit opposition from local fishermen, who didn't like the idea of dumping any water from Fukushima Daiichi into the ocean. Given that sentiment, the ministry judged that another idea for a similar set of pumps closer to the damaged structures was less likely to succeed, Mr. Shinkawa said.

In May, METI set up a 20-person committee of experts—the one Mr. Marui is on—and asked them to come up with a better plan.

Mr. Marui said that one measure Tepco was taking—the construction of a giant sea wall hugging the coast by the damaged reactors—struck him and others on the committee as misguided. Since it was possible that contaminated water was already leaking into waters near the plant, the wall should have been built further out, he says. More important, the first wall built should have been on the landward side of the plant to keep water out of the most contaminated area, he says.

By the end of May, the group came up with a proposal for such a wall, made by freezing the ground in a 1.4-kilometer (0.9-mile) ring around the reactor buildings, and passed the task of honing the idea to a second expert's group.

What the groups didn't know, however, was that on the ground, the situation had worsened again. In May, Tepco started to detect elevated levels of radiation in wells very close to the coast, suggesting that groundwater contamination had advanced farther than previously thought. Tepco admitted the delay when it finally announced its findings in early July.

As news on the spiking radiation readings trickled out from Tepco in July, regulator NRA and its chairman, Mr. Tanaka, went on the attack, demanding faster action and more information. It stated publicly it suspected the tainted water was already pouring into the ocean. By the end of July, the NRA decided it had to form its own group to propose solutions for Fukushima Daiichi's water problems. That 12-member group, composed mostly of experts, regulators and Tepco officials, met for the first time Aug. 2.

"This really isn't something we were supposed to do," said Shinji Kinjo, director of the NRA's Fukushima Daiichi accident measures office, explaining that the regulator's job is to be an umpire, not a player. "But we just couldn't sit by and do nothing."

METI's experts committee finally held another meeting on Aug. 8, deciding to review its previous proposals and come up with another report by the end of September. The NRA group took charge of supervising two of Tepco's three emergency water-contamination measures—such as the plan to remove highly toxic water from seaside trenches—and METI's group took over one, as well as longer-term steps.

Mr. Marui said that the big size of METI's group means it takes longer to decide things and that there is still a debate raging about the plan for ground-freezing, which is an expensive technology that is never been used on such a scale. One of Japan's best-known ground-freezing companies decided not to bid for a feasibility study at the site; the company thought its expertise, in freezing smaller amounts of ground for tunnels, wouldn't be applicable for such a different kind of job, someone familiar with the company's thinking said.

What's really needed is a plan to divert the course of the water, that is still trying to flow in its old river bed, Mr. Marui said.

"We have to plan systematically," Mr. Marui said. "Not just figure out what's needed at that moment."