About 5,500 liters of radioactive water leaked from the nuclear ruins of Fukushima in Japan during a maintenance disruption. Public broadcaster NHK reported this on Thursday.
According to power plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the water that may have partially seeped into the ground was believed to contain 220 times the standard amount of radioactive material required to be reported to the government.
A fault has occurred during maintenance work
According to TEPCO, the radioactive water leak was discovered on Wednesday morning. The reason for this is likely because a valve that should have been closed was left open when workers flushed untreated water from the filtration system during an inspection.
The plant’s operator estimates that it leaked about 5.5 tons of water and contained about 22 billion becquerels of cesium-137 and other radioactive materials that emit gamma rays. For comparison, the default value for government reporting is 100 million becquerels.
Contaminated soil must be removed
According to TEPCO, they found no environmental impact outside the power plant. However, because the leaked water may have seeped into the ground, the company now plans to remove the surrounding contaminated soil.
Recently, Japan was criticized for dumping radioactive water into the sea. At the end of August, the country started discharging the cooling water from Fukushima into the sea, which is happening in several phases. In total, more than 1.3 million cubic meters of water from the Fukushima power plant will be discharged into the sea in the coming decades.
The tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown in 2011
The east coast of Japan was hit by a major earthquake and tsunami in 2011. 18,000 people died in the natural disaster. It also resulted in the failure of the cooling system of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which resulted in a meltdown in three of the six reactors.
Source: Krone
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