Previously On the Waterfront: In early August, the beleaguered Tokyo Electric Power Company announced that an estimated 300 tons (about 75,000 gallons) of radioactive water per day was leaking into the Pacific from its crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
The news came just weeks after Tepco admitted to similar ongoing contamination. The company had long denied there was a risk, even after Japan’s nuclear safety chief said the plant had probably been seeping radioactive water since it was damaged in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, according to a July 26 article in the New York Times.
That misstep compounded new water leaks, which overflowed tanks and pits meant to contain contaminated groundwater that had washed into the plant. The Japanese government, which previously had taken a largely hands-off approach, responded by stepping in to assist Tepco in finding a solution.
Water, Water (Contamination) Everywhere: On Tuesday radiation levels near the holding tanks were found to be increasing, suggesting that there was likely more unidentified leaks, according to Reuters. Levels jumped from 1,800 millisieverts last Saturday to 2,200 on Wednesday, according to reading by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Reuters stated. Both levels are enough to kill an unprotected person within hours.
About 430,000 tons of contaminated water is currently stored on the site and that amount increases by 400 tons a day, according to a September 3 New York Times report. The containers used to store the water range from weaker bolted tanks sitting directly on the ground to more secure welded tanks, some of which rest on concrete foundations, according to Reuters. Tepco has been directed to move the water to stronger tanks.
The Next Water Way: Although the Japanese government’s involvement is an indictment on Tepco’s mishandling of the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup, it is also a financial lifeline—bringing an additional $500 million to address the water leakage problem. The primary plan thus far has been an ambitious $400 million project that would create a mile-long, 100-feet-deep wall of frozen ground around the reactor buildings, according to an August 7 Times article.
If successful the wall would keep groundwater from entering the buildings’ basements and becoming contaminated, eliminating the need to pump and store it. It’s unclear, however, if the technology, which is currently used in building subways, will be effective at such a scale or if it can be built in time. There are also concerns that the wall, which uses electricity like a freezer might, would be susceptible to power outages near the plant, according to the most recent Times article.
Regardless of how the water issues are handled, Tepco, and now the Japanese government, still have bigger cleanup fish to fry. Eventually, the damaged reactor cores will likely need to be removed or risk groundwater contamination. Because of the way the reactors where felled, that could be tricky. In the meantime, efforts are being squandered on issues such as the water leaks.
“Japan is clearly living in denial,” Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a medical doctor who led Parliament’s independent investigation last year into the causes of the nuclear accident, told the Times. “Water keeps building up inside the plant, and debris keeps piling up outside of it. This is all just one big shell game aimed at pushing off the problems until the future.”