14 DAY TRIAL // This Thursday, Tokyo Electric Power Co., otherwise known as Tepco, announced that yet another leak had taken place at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
This time, it would appear that roughly 100 tons of contaminated water escaped a tank and worked their way into the environment.
The only good news is that, according to Tepco, none of this water reached the nearby ocean. On the contrary, it all got absorbed into the ground.
“As there is no drainage way near the leak, which is in any case far from the ocean, it is unlikely that the water has made its way into the sea,” a spokesperson for the company told local media, as cited by International Business Times.
Information made available to the public says that the leak was first documented at about 11.25 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
Specialists were called at the scene, and the tests that they carried out showed that the water spilling from the tank contained 230 million becquerels per liter of strontium.
According to RT, the water also contained several other beta ray-emitting radioactive compounds. This means that it is highly contaminated and dangerous.
The same source tells us that, presently, employees are working on containing the spill and keeping more radioactive water from escaping the tank.
By the looks of it, the Fukushima nuclear plant leaked about 20 trillion becquerels of cesium-137, 10 trillion becquerels of strontium-90 and 40 trillion becquerels of tritium into the nearby ocean since May 2011 and until August 2013.
As reported on several occasions, Tepco is now working on decommissioning the plant.
By this year's February 3, the company managed to remove 22 fresh fuel and 110 spent fuel assemblies from the facility's reactor No. 4.
“Of the 202 fresh fuel and 1,331 spent fuel assemblies in the unit when the process began, 22 fresh fuel and 110 spent fuel assemblies have been removed, all of them safely and without incident,” Tepco explained in a press release issued earlier this month.
“The process will be completed by the end of this year,” the nuclear plant's operator went on to say.