Fukushima Storage Crisis: Full Of Radioactive Water

AlternativeFreePress.com

The Fukushima Nuclear Plant is facing a storage crisis. With nearly 90% of storage tanks capacity already full of radioactive water and 400 metric tons of water accumulating each day, there is nowhere to put all the radioactive water.

In a desperate attempt to maintain some control, TEPCO has negotiated with local fisherman to allow a release of uncontaminated groundwater around the facility into the ocean. Reuters reports that “Tepco’s bypass will release 100 metric tons of groundwater a day that flows downhill towards the devastated plant and funnel it to the sea before it reaches the reactor buildings.”

It is unclear how much these measures will help as 100 metric tones is only 25% of the compounding ground water. It seems unlikely this release will provide lasting relief to Fukushima’s stressed storage capacity. Tepco can hold “more than 431,000 metric tons of radioactive water” but being already at nearly 90% capacity, they will still be running out of space quickly with 300 metric tones a day being added.

It appears clear that this is a last ditch hail-mary effort at delaying the inevitable complete loss of control by TEPCO, as Kenji Nakada, an official at the Fukushima fisheries federation says “The final consideration was based on the fact that we cannot allow them to release contaminated water. We realized that if the situation continued as it was, the whole system will fall down,”

Of course anyone who has been paying attention already has little faith in TEPCO which has repeatedly lied about radiation readings and recently stopped water decontamination.

It’s hard to imagine how things will get any better at Fukushima… It feels like things can’t get any worse, but unfortunately that is not true, this problem compounds every single day, and it appears that over 3 years after it all started we still don’t know how to fix it.

Written by Alternative Free Press
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Sources for this story:

1. Fukushima Fishermen Approve Plan to Release Groundwater from Plant http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fukushima-fishermen-approve-plan-to-release-groundwater-from-plant/