DOHA - Japan's
crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima is
struggling to find space to store tens of
thousands of tonnes of highly contaminated water
used to cool the broken reactors, the manager of
the water treatment team has said.
About
200,000 tonnes of radioactive water, enough to
fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools,
are being stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks
built around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Operator Tokyo Electric Power Company
(TEPCO) has already chopped down trees to make
room for more tanks and predicts the volume of
water will be more than tripled within three
years.
"It's a time-pressing issue because
the storage of contaminated
water has its limits,
there is only limited storage space," the
water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told the
AP news agency in an interview this week.
Dumping massive amounts of water into the
melting reactors was the only way to avoid an even
bigger catastrophe after the meltdown at TEPCOs
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactor, caused by
the March 11, 2011, tsunami.
Okamura
remembers frantically trying to find a way to get
water to spent fuel pools located on the highest
floor of the 50m high reactor buildings. Without
water, the spent fuel likely would have overheated
and melted, sending radioactive smoke for miles
and affecting possibly millions of people.
The measures to keep the plant under
control created another huge headache for the
utility: what to do with all the radioactive water
that leaked out of the damaged reactors and
collected in the basements of reactor buildings
and nearby facilities.
"At that time, we
never expected high-level contaminated water to
turn up in the turbine building," Okamura said.
He was tasked with setting up a treatment
system that would make the water clean enough for
reuse as a coolant, and was also aimed at reducing
health risks for workers and at curbing
environmental damage.
At first, the
utility shunted the tainted water into existing
storage tanks near the reactors. Meanwhile,
Okamura's 55-member team scrambled to get a
treatment unit up and running within three months
of the accident, a project that would normally
take about two years, he said. Using that
equipment, TEPCO was able to circulate reprocessed
water back into the reactor cores.
Even
though the reactors now are being cooled
exclusively with recycled water, the volume of
contaminated water is still increasing, mostly
because groundwater is seeping through cracks into
the reactor and turbine basements.
Next
month, Okamura's group plans to flip the switch on
new purifying equipment using Toshiba Corp
technology. "By purifying the water using the ALPS
system, theoretically, all radioactive products
can be purified to below detection levels," he
said.
In the meantime its tanks are
filling up, mostly because leaks in reactor
facilities are allowing groundwater to pour in.
Masashi Goto, a nuclear engineer and
university lecturer, said the contaminated water
build-up posed a major long-term threat to health
and the environment. He said the radioactive water
in the basements may already be getting into the
underground water system, where it could reach far
beyond the plant via underground water channels,
possibly reaching the ocean or public water
supplies.
"There are pools of some 10,000
or 20,000 tonnes of contaminated water in each
plant, and there are many of these, and to bring
all of these to one place would mean you would
have to treat hundreds of thousands of tonnes of
contaminated water, which is mind-blowing in
itself," Goto said. "It's an outrageous amount,
truly outrageous.".
The plant will have to
deal with contaminated water until all the melted
fuel and other debris is removed from the reactor,
a process that will easily take more than a
decade.
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