Tepco Says Iodine at Kashiwazaki Plant May Be From Fukushima
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it found traces of radioactive iodine 131 near its Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant that may have originated from the utility’s stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors.
Operations at Kashiwazaki on Japan’s western coast are normal, the company known as Tepco said in a statement today. The iodine was found in seaweed that may have drifted over from the Fukushima plant on the country’s eastern coast, according to the statement.
Radiation leaks from the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima rank the accident on the same scale as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The 20-kilometer (12-mile) exclusion zone around Fukushima has forced the evacuation of 50,000 households, extermination of livestock and disposal of crops.
Chubu Electric Power Co., which shut all the reactors at its sole nuclear station following the Fukushima disaster, detected radioactive cobalt 58 on a filter attached to an exhaust stack at the plant, the utility said today.
The amount of cobalt 58 found at the Hamaoka plant in southeast Japan wasn’t high enough to be harmful, according to Chubu Electric.
Maintenance at the plant’s reactor No. 5 may have tainted the filter, the company said.
During the reactor’s shutdown, about 400 metric tons of seawater leaked into the steam condenser and 5 tons of it flowed into the pressure vessel, Akio Miyazaki, the Tokyo-based spokesman at the utility, said by phone today.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Yuji Okada in Tokyo at yokada6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for the story： Alexander Kwiatkowski akwiatkowsk2@bloomberg.net.
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