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Showing posts with label Storage tank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Storage tank. Show all posts

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Worker error causes Fukushima leak


Today's post from the BBC.

This aerial photo shows the storage tank, fifth from left at left plot, which was found to be overflowing, at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant at Okuma town in Fukushima prefecture,...

Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has a new leak of radioactive water after workers overfilled a storage tank, its operator says.

The workers miscalculated the tank's capacity as it was tilted on unlevel ground, plant operator Tepco said.

It said around 430 litres (100 gallons) of water may have leaked from the tank, and could have flowed into the sea.

The plant has experienced several leaks since being crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

One of the largest leaks took place in August, when Tepco discovered a leak of at least 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water at a different part of the plant.

The latest leak was discovered by workers late on Wednesday.

Tepco official Masayuki Ono said: "We would like to apologise that we have to announce that we've had another leak in our tanks today."

"This is partly because we've had to fill our tanks to the brim in order to deal with the difficult management of rain water overflow following [a typhoon]," he added.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that Tepco had failed to deal with the leaks successfully.

"It's actually leaking so of course we can't say that [Tepco] have been properly dealing with the issue. It should not be leaking at all," he said.

The 2011 disaster knocked out cooling systems to the nuclear plant's reactors, three of which melted down.

Water is now being pumped in to cool the reactors, but storing the resultant large quantities of radioactive water has proved a...


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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Radiation Near Japanese Plant’s Tanks Suggests New Leaks

Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com


A crisis over contaminated water at Japan’s stricken nuclear plant worsened on Saturday when the plant’s operator said it had detected high radiation levels near storage tanks, a finding that raised the possibility of additional leaks.


The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found the high levels of radiation at four separate spots on the ground, near some of the hundreds of tanks used to store toxic water produced by makeshift efforts to cool the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s three damaged reactors. The highest reading was 1,800 millisieverts per hour, or enough to give a lethal dose in about four hours, Tepco said.