Fukushima leaks 15 tons of radioactive water

They were worried about overflow of radioactive water… but this was something different. Fifteen metric tons of water leaked out of the system they’re using at Fukushima to decontaminate the water and soaked into the ground.

Right – as they try to clean up what may be the worst nuclear disaster in history, they continue to make things worse.

Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) has a big problem:

• In order to keep Fukushima’s melted-down reactor cores from melting down even further, they have to cool them with tons and tons of water.
• The water becomes contaminated with radioactive materials and has to be stored on-site.
• Storage was topping out, and with more rain expected, officials were worried that the storage would overflow and spill even more radioactivity into the ocean.
• TEPCO set up a system to decontaminate the water, clean out the radioactives, and then re-use the water for cooling.

They had hoped to start running the system last week, but glitches kept it off-line until Monday. Once they did start running, it looks like there was one more major glitch – you don’t lose 15 tons in 90 minutes from the equivalent of  a leaky faucet.

TEPCO says they have the situation corrected now and are decontaminating the water as planned.

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