Japan to issue gravest Fukushima nuclear warning in two years; Fukushima Springs Another Leak in Battle With Radiated Water

Japan to issue gravest Fukushima nuclear warning in two years: agency

Tue, Aug 20 2013

By Kentaro Hamada and James Topham

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan will dramatically raise its warning about the severity of a toxic water leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant, its nuclear watchdog said on Wednesday, its most serious action since the plant was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The deepening crisis at the Fukushima plant will be upgraded from a level 1 “anomaly” to a level three “serious incident” on an international scale for radiological releases, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said. That will mark the first time Japan has issued a warning on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) since three reactor meltdowns after the massive quake in March 2011.Water still leaking from the plant is so contaminated that a person standing close to it for an hour would receive five times the annual recommended limit for nuclear workers in a year.

A maximum level 7 was declared at the battered plant after explosions led to a loss of power and cooling two years ago, confirming Fukushima as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl a quarter of a century earlier.

Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Fukushima, the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday. The leak was classified as an “anomaly” earlier this week.

The NRA’s impending assessment upgrade came in a document posted on the agency’s website on Wednesday, with formal adoption to follow a meeting that is being held by the authority’s commissioners, the NRA spokesman said by telephone.

“Judging from the amount and the density of the radiation in the contaminated water that leaked … a level 3 assessment is appropriate,” the document said.

The leak, which has not been plugged, is so contaminated that a person standing 50 cm (1.6 feet) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers.

After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells.

Each one-step INES increase represents a tenfold increase in severity, according to a factsheet on the website of the International Atomic Energy Agency. (www.iaea.org/)

Fukushima Springs Another Leak in Battle With Radiated Water

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) reported another breach of the defenses it has built at the Fukushima nuclear plant in its more than two-year struggle to stop leaks of radioactive water into the soil and sea.

Just weeks after the utility backtracked from earlier statements and acknowledged radiated water was flowing into the Pacific Ocean at a rate of 300 tons a day, it has found another leak from a storage tank.

Prime Minster Shinzo Abe weighed in on the disaster response this month, signaling that Tokyo Electric alone isn’t up to the task. The government has yet to say what other measures it’s considering to contain the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, including bringing in foreign expertise.

“Two years down the line from the accident, I would expect there would have been better plans,” said Tom O’Sullivan, an analyst with Tokyo-based energy consultant Mathyos. “It’s a huge logistical challenge and perhaps the Japanese government should have gotten involved at an earlier stage.”

Shinichi Tanaka, the chairman of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, has said the water leaks are getting out of control and creating a state of emergency, according to Shinji Kinjo, who leads a disaster task force for the regulator.

Largest Leak

In the latest incident, the company said about 300 tons of contaminated water probably leaked into the soil from a tank due to an open valve in a containment barrier surrounding the storage vessel.

That’s equivalent to the amount of water used by about 200 U.S. families each day, according to calculations based on Environmental Protection Agency data. The leak is the largest from a storage tank to date, Masayuki Ono, an official at Tepco’s plant siting department, said at a press conference.

The leak was discovered after crews found a drop in the water level of the 1,000-ton capacity tank, Mayumi Yoshida, a spokeswoman for the company known as Tepco, said today in a phone interview. She wasn’t able to say why the valve, used to drain rainwater from the containment barrier, had remained open.

Radiation levels as high as 100 millisieverts per hour were detected near the tank, Ono said. Under government guidelines, plant workers are permitted exposure to 100 millisieverts over the course of five years.

Water Storage

The leaked water was found to have levels of beta radiation of 80 million becquerels per liter, including particles such as strontium, Ono said. That’s 8 million times the limit for drinking water under health ministry guidelines. Strontium has been linked to bone cancers.

Tepco stores about 400 tons of water a day at the plant after pumping it out from under the plant’s reactors, which melted down as a result of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The water that is pumped is a combination of what is injected into the plant’s reactors to cool the fuel and groundwater that flows into the reactor basements from nearby hills.

There are more than 1,000 tanks on the plant grounds, with capacity for 390,000 tons of water, according to Kaoru Suzuki, a Tepco spokeswoman. About 330,000 tons of that capacity, or around 85 percent, had been used as of Aug. 13.

Radioactive

While the water is treated to remove some of the cesium radioactive particles before it is stored, higher levels of beta radiation remain, Yoshida said.

Infants exposed to radiation near the damaged nuclear power plant have a higher risk of developing cancer, though the threat outside the immediate area is low, the World Health Organization said in February in the first global assessment of risks from the 2011 disaster.

Seawater samples near the plant were found to have levels of tritium, another of the radioactive particles being monitored, at 4,700 becquerels per liter yesterday, the highest since sampling began, Kyodo news reported, citing the company.

Human exposure to radiation at moderate to high levels can lead to cancers, such as leukemia, according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.

The body, known as UNSCEAR, is in charge of the most comprehensive study of the Fukushima disaster and is expected to deliver its report to the UN in October this year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jacob Adelman in Tokyo at jadelman1@bloomberg.net; Yuji Okada in Tokyo at yokada6@bloomberg.net

Last updated: August 21, 2013 8:15 am

Crippled Fukushima nuclear plant springs fresh leak

By Ben McLannahan in Tokyo

Shares in Tokyo Electric Power plunged as much as 15 per cent on Wednesday asJapan’s nuclear regulator raised concerns over a huge leakage of contaminated water at Tepco’s stricken Fukushima plant.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said that the latest incident – in which 300 tons of contaminated water seeped from a storage tank – could rank as a “level 3” classification on an international eight-point scale. That marks a “serious extraordinary event”.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Tokyo Electric Power said it had detected a leak in one of the tanks that store water used to cool melted uranium fuel rods. A puddle that formed near the tank was emitting a radiation dose of 100 millisieverts an hour when measured a short distance above the surface, Tepco said – about 350,000 times higher than natural background levels.

It is the worst leak in more than 2½ years of efforts to contain the effects of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The NRA classified the leak as a “level 1” incident, the lowest on an eight-point international scale. A spokesman confirmed that it is the first time the NRA has attached a so-called INES rating to an incident at Fukushima since the government-linked watchdog was established last September.

The disclosure of the leak, the fifth in a series of similar incidents since January, is likely to increase pressure on the Japanese government to deal more urgently with the flow of toxic water into the soil and seas surrounding the plant.

This month, after Tepco admitted that water laced with radioactive particles was probably ending up in the sea, having mixed with natural groundwater, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he would “take steps” to deal with the problem “instead of leaving everything to Tepco”.

Tepco has launched an operation to pump some of the groundwater into wells before it reaches the stricken plant and mixes with dangerously irradiated coolant water. A panel of government experts is also considering an ambitious proposal to freeze soil around the plant to prevent groundwater from seeping in.

Last year Tokyo effectively nationalised Tepco, Japan’s largest utility by number of customers, by injecting Y1tn ($10.3bn) of public funds. The government has also set aside taxpayer money for the development of robots to help in the process of decommissioning the plant.

Before the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, Japan depended on nuclear power for about 30 per cent of its electricity generation. Now that almost all of the nation’s 50 operable reactors have been taken offline for safety inspections, the annual bill for fossil fuel imports has risen to about Y25tn from Y18tn before the disaster, leading to huge losses at utilities and dragging Japan’s trade balance into deficit.

Since coming to power in December, Mr Abe has abandoned a plan by the previous government to phase out nuclear power by the 2030s, while urging faster restarts of idled plants. Some now expect the prime minister’s pro-nuclear position to harden, following his party’s victory in last month’s upper house elections.

“His stance is now clearer,” said a government adviser. “He understands without a certain share of nuclear, the Japanese economy cannot survive.”