Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

top
A Tokyo Electric Power worker walks next to waste water tanks at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant/AFP

World

Fukushima workers checking 300 tanks for more leaks

Experts say levels of radiation in the ocean in several spots along the Fukushima coast had been recovering.

“It is too early to estimate the impact of the latest leak,” said Masashi Kusakabe, researcher at Marine Ecology research Institute.

“All we can do is to continue monitoring levels of marine radiation very carefully,” Kusakabe said.

Jota Kanda, an oceanographer and professor at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, said: “It is inevitable that some water has reached the sea. So far its impact on the marine environment is limited, but it will be a different story if more leaks happen.”

TEPCO — which faces huge clean-up and compensation costs — has struggled to cope with the disaster.

More than two years after the meltdowns, it continues to be beset by difficulties, chief among which is how it should handle the vast amounts of water used to cool the broken reactors.

Around 1,000 tanks of varying sizes have been installed at the site to contain it, but experts warn this can only be a temporary fix.

A series of problems, and delays in announcing them to the public, have added to the impression that the huge utility is not on top of the clean-up.

TEPCO in July admitted for the first time that radioactive groundwater had been leaking outside the plant.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

This month it started pumping it out to reduce leakage into the Pacific. It said this week that 30 trillion becquerels of strontium and caesium, possibly cancer-causing substances, could have entered the ocean since May 2011 from this leak.

While no one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of the radiation released by the meltdowns, large areas around the plant had to be evacuated.

Tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to their homes, with scientists warning some areas may have to be abandoned.

About The Author

Pages: 1 2

Comments
Advertisement

More on Capital News