Tepco Behind Schedule in Processing Radioactive Water on Equipment Trouble
Tokyo Electric Power Co. has fallen behind schedule to process and remove millions of liters of highly radioactive water at its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant because of repeated equipment breakdowns.
Around 119 million liters of the water -- enough to fill more than 47 Olympic-sized swimming pools -- has accumulated in building basements, including four reactor facilities. That’s down 2 percent from 121 million liters on June 28, according to data released yesterday by the utility known as Tepco.
“It would be disastrous if the accumulated water leaks to the environment,” Tetsuo Ito, the head of the Atomic Energy Research Institute at Kinki University, said in a telephone interview. Rainfall and underground water leakage into the basements is adding to the volume of radioactive water, he said.
Ito’s assesment of rainfall and underground water leaks mixing with radiated water is supported by Tepco figures that show 42 million liters have been treated using equipment supplied by Areva SA and Kurion Inc., yet the latest data show the basement water has fallen by about 2 million liters.
It will be “difficult” to process all the water by the end of the year as planned, Junichi Matsumoto, general manager at the utility, said in Tokyo yesterday. The treatment system started in June and had 32 breakdowns as of Aug. 13, the utility said Aug. 16.
Water poured through reactors after standard cooling systems failed in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami became highly radioactive and filled up basements at the station. Removal and decontamination of the water is key to achieving the so-called cold shutdown of the reactors.
Boost Processing
“We want to boost the processing rate for the decontamination system,” Goshi Hosono, the minister in charge of response to the nuclear crisis, said yesterday at a briefing. Reducing the amount of basement water will allow injection of more water into reactors to speed up the cold shutdown.
Tepco has been pouring water to bring reactor temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius (212 Fahrenheit), or cold shutdown, after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami caused three meltdowns at the station in the worst accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
Tepco today started a backup water treatment system, developed by Toshiba Corp. and Shaw Group Inc., to help speed up the decontamination process.
The utility expects the capacity utilization rate to rise to 90 percent with the help of the new system, from an average 69 percent so far, according to Matsumoto.
Tepco dumped more than 10 million liters of “low level” radioactive water into the sea in April to make room for storage of highly toxic fluids. Local fishermen and neighboring countries including China and South Korea protested the move.
Japan has found 77 cases of fish and marine life off the coast of Fukushima prefecture contaminated with radiation exceeding the regulatory limit after testing 700 seafood items, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said in an Aug. 14 report.
To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Yuji Okada in Tokyo at yokada6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net
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