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US ex-nuke official ‘surprised’ Japan so slow to tackle leaks
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A FORMER US nuclear regulatory chief said yesterday that leaks of contaminated water at the crippled Fukushima plant had been known since early in the crisis and have worsened because Japan acted too slowly.
Gregory Jaczko said that US and Japanese officials knew leaks would occur when massive quantities of water were used to cool molten reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant after a major earthquake and tsunami hit in March 2011.
Jaczko said he was surprised how long it took Japan to start tackling the problem.
“It’s been known for a long time that this would be an issue,” he told a news conference in Tokyo. “My biggest surprise is to some extent how it’s been allowed to deteriorate, a little bit, and how it’s almost become a surprise again that there are contamination problems, that there is leakage out into the sea.”
When the plant was in critical condition with three reactor cores melted and in dire need of cooling water, Jaczko said, Japanese and US officials disputed how much water should be put in.
He said the Japanese government was concerned that the flooding those reactor vessels and reactor buildings with cooling water “would lead to greater leakage of ground water,” whereas the United States’ Nuclear Regulatory Commission emphasized the need to keep reactors cool and under control to minimize airborne contamination.
But the “focus was lost” on the need to keep addressing the radioactive water problem, apparently delaying action on mitigating the problem, said Jaczko, who was in Japan at the invitation of an anti-nuclear citizen’s group. He resigned as chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year.
Japanese officials confirmed for the first time in July that contaminated ground water has been leaking into the Pacific from soon after the accident.
Leaders of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which was in power during the crisis, acknowledged last week that a plan to build an underground wall to block contaminated water leaks was put off after plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. resisted the plan, citing financial reasons.
Only the construction of the steel seawall has begun.
Public criticism of TEPCO and the government for their handling of the crisis remains high, especially after recent underground water leaks into the ocean and from storage tanks of contaminated water.
The government is funding more advanced water treatment equipment to make contaminated water clean enough to be released into the sea and paying for a costly ice wall to surround the reactor and turbine buildings.
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