Fukushima radioactive water clean-up begins

Tepco, the operator of Japan's stricken nuclear power plant, has said it is starting an operation to clean up the site's radioactive water after several glitches and delays. Large and expanding pools of radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which is about 150 miles north-east of Tokyo, were in danger of spilling into the sea within a week unless action was taken, officials said. The company has pumped massive amounts of water to cool three reactors at the nuclear plant, which went into meltdown after the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March this year. Managing the radioactive water has become a problem as the plant runs out of places to store the liquid. About 110,000 tonnes of highly radioactive water, enough to fill 40 Olympic-size swimming pools, is being held at the plant. Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, with help from the French nuclear group Areva, the US firm Kurion and other companies, has been test-running a system decontaminating radioactive water and reusing it to cool the reactors. But in a setback that delayed the plan by about a week, water leaked on Thursday from a facility used to absorb caesium. Junichi Matsumoto, a Tepco official, said the company was aiming to use some of the cleaned water to cool the reactors within the next few days. This would not require pumping in any fresh water. In April the utility dumped about 10,000 tonnes of water contaminated with low-level radioactivity into the ocean, prompting criticism from China and South Korea. Even if the water treatment is successful, Tepco next faces the task of dealing with the highly radioactive sludge that will be left over from the decontamination process. It is unclear where the sludge will be stored for the long term. Tepco aims to complete the initial steps in limiting releases of more radiation from the plant, and in shutting down the three unstable reactors, by January next year. Tepco said it had not made significant alterations to its timeline. The operator said that the storage of high-radiation sludge, likely to arise from the treatment of contaminated water, and improved conditions for the plant's workers during the summer were aspects it was examining. Measures for the workers included access to more doctors, body counters that measure exposure to radiation and resting areas away from the summer heat. The ultimate goal is to bring the reactors to a state of "cold shutdown", where the uranium at the core can no longer boil off the water that is used as the coolant. That would allow officials to move on to cleaning up the site and eventually removing the fuel, a process that could take more than 10 years. From / Guardian