Tepco Pumps Tainted Water From Reactor Trenches, Adds Backup Power Cables
The Unit 3 reactor building at Tepco's Dai-Ichi Plant
Tokyo Electric Power Co. via Bloomberg
The Unit 3 reactor building at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant on April 15, 2011.
The Unit 3 reactor building at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant on April 15, 2011. Source: Tokyo Electric Power Co. via Bloomberg
Tokyo Electric Power Co. pumped highly radioactive water from trenches at its crippled nuclear plant, and said it expects to complete installing additional cables to supply backup power to the station’s six reactors.
The company known as Tepco moved 1.41 million liters (372,000 gallons) of the water from the reactor No. 2 building, about 14 percent of the total, to a storage unit by 7 a.m. local time today, spokesman Takashi Kurita said at a media briefing in Tokyo. About 10 million liters is expected to be transferred over 26 days, the company said on April 19.
Tepco is battling radiation leaks from its Fukushima Dai- Ichi plant after a magnitude-9 earthquake on March 11 unleashed a tsunami that flooded the station, triggering the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. The water that was poured to cool the reactors must be removed to repair the pumps and backup generators knocked out by the tsunami.
“While not stable yet, things are generally moving in the right direction,” Penn Bowers, a Tokyo-based analyst for CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, said by telephone today. “I’m not sure we’re going to see any major corner being turned at this point. There’s going to be a slow grind, probably for months.”
Tepco plans to connect power cables linking the plant’s six reactors today, Teruaki Kobayashi, the company’s head of nuclear maintenance, said at today’s briefing. The reactors are currently connected in pairs to external power sources.
The company’s shares rose 8.4 percent to 438 yen in Tokyo, their first gain in eight days. The stock has declined almost 80 percent since the quake and tsunami, which left about 26,000 people dead or missing.
Resignation Undecided
Tepco President Masataka Shimizu told Japanese lawmakers he hasn’t decided when to resign to take responsibility for the crisis. Shimizu was asked by lawmaker Teruhiko Mashiko when he will submit his resignation while appearing today before a budget committee of the Japanese parliament.
Board members will have their pay cut by 50 percent after the accident, the Nikkei newspaper reported today, without saying where it got the information.
The company has been criticized by the government for responding too slowly to the crisis that unfolded at the Fukushima plant after the tsunami washed ashore.
Tepco poured millions of liters of water to cool the reactors and spent fuel after the accident, causing flooding in the basements and trenches near the buildings that house them. Some highly contaminated water leaked into the sea and the utility has dumped less-toxic fluids into the ocean.
Contaminated Water
“We will continue pouring water until stable cooling conditions for the reactors have been achieved,” Shimizu told lawmakers in parliament today.
About 50 million liters of other contaminated water is estimated to be lying around reactors No. 1, 2 and 3, the company said on April 5.
About 520,000 liters of water with a level of radioactivity that was 20,000 times the legal limit leaked into the ocean between April 1 and 6, Junichi Matsumoto, a Tepco general manager, said last week.
The central government last week started enforcing a no- entry zone within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the Fukushima plant as a public health measure after residents returned to the area to check their homes.
The station, where three of the reactors are damaged, is located about 220 kilometers north of Tokyo.
An earlier directive asking about 80,000 residents living within the 20-kilometer radius to evacuate wasn’t legally binding. One person per household will be allowed to return to their homes for two-hour periods to retrieve possessions.
Japan’s government on April 12 raised the severity rating of the Fukushima crisis to the highest on an international scale, the same level as the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. Tepco officials have said the station, which has withstood hundreds of aftershocks, may release more radiation than Chernobyl before the crisis is contained.
To contact the reporters on this story: Yuji Okada in Tokyo at yokada6@bloomberg.net; Michio Nakayama in Tokyo at mnakayama4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net -0- Apr/25/ :19 GMT
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