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TEPCO admits to groundwater concerns
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Highly radioactive water leaking from a storage tank at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant may have seeped into groundwater flowing towards the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator said yesterday.
It is the first time Tokyo Electric Power has revealed leaks from the tank could also be polluting the groundwater beneath the plant. TEPCO has previously admitted radiation has seeped into the groundwater and out to sea.
About 300 tons of irradiated water leaked from one of around 1,000 storage tanks last month.
TEPCO said yesterday workers had detected radiation of 650 becquerels per liter in samples from a monitoring well dug near the damaged tank.
“There is the possibility that the contaminated water, diluted by rainwater and others, has seeped into soil and reached groundwater,” TEPCO said.
The groundwater from surrounding hills flows beneath the plant and out to sea.
As it seeps through the soil it mixes with polluted fluid that has seeped into the ground under the reactors.
The government said on Tuesday it would spend US$470 million on a scheme to freeze the soil around the stricken reactors to form an impenetrable wall of ice they hope will direct groundwater away from the plant.
Thousands of tons of radioactive water are being stored in the temporary tanks at Fukushima. Much of it has been used to cool molten reactors at the plant wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011.
The leaks from some of these tanks has created a growing sense of crisis.
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