Search This Blog

Monday, March 28, 2011

Japan : Radioactive water removal underway, fresh seawater pollution found

Via Kyodo News, excerpt :

" Work to remove highly radioactive water from inside buildings at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continued Monday, in an effort to enable engineers to restore the power station's crippled cooling functions, while high radioactive concentrations were again detected in the nearby sea.

The plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said early Monday that the concentration of radioactive substances of a pool at the No. 2 reactor was 100,000 times higher than usual for water in a reactor core, correcting its earlier analysis of 10 million times higher.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a press conference that the highly radioactive water found at the basement of the No. 2 reactor's turbine building is ''believed to have temporarily had contact with fuel rods (in the reactor's core) that have partially melted.''

The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, a government panel, said Monday in its recommendations to Prime Minister Naoto Kan that highly radioactive water in the No. 2 reactor's containment vessel could have directly leaked, raising concerns that polluted water could spread to the building's underground and to the sea."

No comments:

Post a Comment