The Tokyo Electric Power Company is again adrift in a river of woes after being unable to stanch the flow of contaminated water at its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Experts Wednesday estimated the facility is leaking 300 tons (about 75,000 gallons) of radioactive water into the ocean per day.

News of the leakage—which is overflowing tanks and pits meant to contain groundwater that washes into the plant and becomes contaminated—follows the Tepco’s July admission that earlier leaks threatened the Pacific. The Company had long denied there was a risk, even after Japan’s nuclear safety chief stated the plant had probably been seeping radioactive water since it was damaged in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, according to the New York Times. (See this National Geographic piece for an excellent round up of the ongoing argument regarding ocean contamination.)

The recent overflow is the result of water breaching a chemically created wall of hardened ground surrounding containment efforts. In order to stop the breach, Tepco must pump and somehow store about 100 tons of contaminated water each day, according to Reuters. Pumping equipment won’t be available until the end of the month and Tepco is currently at 85 percent of its storage capacity, Reuters stated.

The Japanese government—which has previously taken a largely hands-off approach—said it will step in to assist Tepco in finding a solution. The change in posture indicates that Japan has had enough of Tepco’s inability to manage cleanup efforts, which have been plagued with technical problems and failures to communicate risk, experts say.

“This is an admission by the government that Tepco has mismanaged the cleanup and misinformed the public,” Eiji Yamaguchi, a professor of science and technology policy at Doshisha University in Kyoto, told the New York Times. “The government has no choice but to end two years of Tepco obfuscating the actual condition of the plant.”

Government involvement could, however, free up public funds to be used toward an ambitious $400 million project that would create a wall of frozen ground around the reactor buildings a mile long and 100-feet deep, according to the Times. 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.

Regardless of what efforts are employed to stop leaks, it appears Tepco will no longer have free reign in decision making.

“This is not an issue we can let Tepco take complete responsibility of,” the Times cites Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as saying at a recent cabinet meeting. “We must deal with this at the national level.”