Hoo boy..

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/....html?_r=1&

Fukushima Nuclear Plant Leaking 300 Tons Of Tainted Water Daily

Japan says Fukushima leak worse than thought, government joins clean-up

(Reuters) - Highly radioactive water from Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is pouring out at a rate of 300 tonnes a day, officials said on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the government to step in and help in the clean-up.

The revelation amounted to an acknowledgement that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) has yet to come to grips with the scale of the catastrophe, 2 1/2 years after the plant was hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami. Tepco only recently admitted water had leaked at all.

Calling water containment at the Fukushima Daiichi station an "urgent issue," Abe ordered the government for the first time to get involved to help struggling Tepco handle the crisis.

The leak from the plant 220 km (130 miles) northeast of Tokyo is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in a week. The water is spilling into the Pacific Ocean, but it was not immediately clear how much of a threat it poses.

As early as January this year, Tepco found fish contaminated with high levels of radiation inside a port at the plant. Local fishermen and independent researchers had already suspected a leak of radioactive water, but Tepco denied the claims.

Tetsu Nozaki, the chairman of the Fukushima fisheries federation said he had only heard of the latest estimates of the magnitude of the seepage from media reports.

Environmental group Greenpeace said Tepco had "anxiously hid the leaks" and urged Japan to seek international expertise.

"Greenpeace calls for the Japanese authorities to do all in their power to solve this situation, and that includes increased transparancy...and getting international expertise in to help find solutions," Dr. Rianne Teule of Greenpeace International said in an emailed statement.

In the weeks after the disaster, the government allowed Tepco to dump tens of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific in an emergency move.

But the escalation of the crisis raises the risk of an even longer and more expensive clean-up, already forecast to take more than 40 years and cost $11 billion.

The admission further dents the credibility of Tepco, criticised for its failure to prepare for the tsunami and earthquake, for a confused response to the disaster and for covering up shortcomings.

"We think that the volume of water (leaking into the Pacific) is about 300 tonnes a day," said Yushi Yoneyama, an official with the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees energy policy.

Tatsuya Shinkawa, a director in METI's Nuclear Accident Response Office, told reporters the government believed water had been leaking for two years, but Yoneyama told Reuters it was unclear how long the water had been leaking at the current rate.

Shinkawa described the water as "highly" contaminated.

The water is from the area between the crippled reactors and the ocean, where Tepco has sought to block the flow of contaminated water by chemically hardening the soil.

Tetsu Nozaki, head of the Fukushima fisheries federation called for action to end the spillage.

"If the water was indeed leaking out at 300 tonnes a day for more than two years, the radiation readings should be far worse," Nozaki told Reuters. "Either way, we have asked Tepco to stop leaking contaminated water into the ocean."

ABE STEPS IN

Abe ordered his government into action. The contaminated water was "an urgent issue to deal with", he told reporters after a meeting of a government task force on the disaster.

"Rather than relying on Tokyo Electric, the government will take measures," he said after instructing METI Minister Toshimitsu Motegi to ensure Tepco takes appropriate action.

The prime minister stopped short of pledging funds to address the issue, but the ministry has requested a budget allocation, an official told Reuters.

The Nikkei newspaper said the funds would be used to freeze the soil to keep groundwater out of reactor buildings - a project estimated to cost up to 40 billion yen ($410 million).

Tepco's handling of the clean-up has complicated Japan's efforts to restart its 50 nuclear power plants. All but two remain shut since the disaster because of safety concerns.

That has made Japan dependent on expensive imported fuels.

An official from the newly created nuclear watchdog told Reuters on Monday that the highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Fukushima was creating an "emergency" that Tepco was not containing on its own.

Abe on Wednesday asked the regulator's head to "do his best to find out the cause and come up with effective measures".

Tepco pumps out some 400 tonnes a day of groundwater flowing from the hills above the nuclear plant into the basements of the destroyed buildings, which mixes with highly irradiated water used to cool the fuel that melted down in three reactors.

Tepco is trying to prevent groundwater from reaching the plant by building a "bypass", but recent spikes of radioactive elements in sea water prompted the utility to reverse denials and acknowledge that tainted water is reaching the sea.

Tepco and the industry ministry have been working since May on a proposal to freeze the soil to prevent groundwater from leaking into the reactor buildings.

Similar technology is used in subway construction, but Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that the vast scale of Tepco's attempt was "unprecedented in the world."

The technology was proposed by Kajima Corp, , a construction company already heavily involved in the clean-up.

Experts say maintaining the ground temperatures for months or years would be costly. The plan is to freeze a 1.4 km (nearly one mile) perimeter around the four damaged reactors by drilling shafts into the ground and pumping coolant through them.

"Right now there are no details (of the project yet). There's no blueprint, no nothing yet, so there's no way we can scrutinise it," said Shinji Kinjo, head of the task force set up by the nuclear regulator to deal with the water issue.

($1 = 97.6050 Japanese yen)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-japan-fukushima-pm-idUSBRE97601K20130807

I went to post here and found someone, Nuke, had recently posted here. Yes, the 300 tons a day is worrisome. I am of course studying the situation. The effect on fish and the marine environment is of course, bad. However, fish exude most of the radiation and only about 1/100 of it remains in their bodies. Good news for Japan which is the largest per capita fish consumer in the world. The scientific opinion about this is that the effect on human health is negligible.

However, a recent report has revealed that the number of kids from Fukushima diagnosed with thryoid cancer since they started testing them about a year after the disaster has risen another 6 to 18 kids. This is over a two year period. Comparing, in 2005 46 kids were diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I don't like these numbers. Admittedly they are screening a lot more, so cases that wouldn't have been detected for years are being detected earlier, but still..

I am probably repeating myself, but thyroid cancer comes from radioactive iodine, which has a half life of 8 days, so any cancer resulting from the disaster came from the first several days after the accident.

The news was not out in English last time I checked, but I am sure it soon will be.

And more tanks leaking....

A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said earlier on Wednesday the agency plans to upgrade the severity of the crisis from a level 1 "anomaly" to a level three "serious incident" on an international scale for radiological releases.

Such a move would be the most serious action taken since the plant was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

===

Water in the latest leak 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.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/fukushima-nuclear-crisis_n_3788796.html

Here is a great summation of the situation in Fukushima Daiichi (again just saying Fukushima doesn't work for me. I lived in Fukushima and the area I was in was pretty untouched by all of this).

The man being interviewed is very knowledgeable and makes it clear that the only real concern is the water leaking out of Daiichi and the tanks they are trying to collect it with.

A lot has been said about how small the radiation is from these leaks compared to say the first week or two. But look at this blurb:

"According to Kanda’s estimates, which are based on official data from Tepco, the cesium-137 in the highly contaminated water in the basements of Fukushima No. 1′s flooded reactor buildings which has nearly twice the cesium-137 released by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which was estimated at 85 petabecquerels by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation."

So everything is okay, as long as a massive earthquake doesn't come along and allow all this to spill into the ocean before it gets taken out and treated. And there is always more building up.

It's about the tanks

Sorry a second post:

Also worrisome is that most of the water that has been collected into these ever increasing tanks (independent of the problem above) has had most of it's cesium removed. But strontium and a few others are still therer. Strontium is a really bad one, causing bone cancer among others. It collects in fish and human bones. Many of the more hastily constructed tanks are starting to cause problems and some are leaking this stuff. As time passes many more tanks could start leaking more water that makes it's way to the ocean.

And I don't know if anyone heard this, but TEPCO got caught again not checking (or hoping no one else would notice) that the reason several radiation measurements were saying 100 millisieverts and no more was because that was as high as these devices' reading went. New insrumentation was brought in and in some places (in areas around the leaks) the radiation was 18 TIMES HIGHER than was realized. 18 TIMES! This is mostly an issue for those working there, but can you imagine being a worker there when you heard this?

Got a good shaking about 2 am this morning. Even woke up the wife and son who I thought could sleep through a train wreck. They center was in the region of Fukushima that Daiichi sits, so even bigger there. Apparently Daiichi has had no rise in radiation etc. I always imagine more cracked containment, and that spent fuel rod pool that could cause all kind of problems if it ever collapsed.

All is well. That is all.

Even the news is getting smart as no one trusts TEPCO to tie it's own shoe laces. The news said about the earthquake "We have received no information that on the ground that anything has changed at Daiichi."

That is all.