TEPCO anticipated the situation...What about long term?

April 7, 2013

TEPCO likely to expedite setup of tank

The Yomiuri Shimbun

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000113545

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is likely to accelerate the construction of a new tank to store radioactive water at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, as the existing tanks are expected to be filled by July.

The company has to urgently review control measures for radioactive liquid at the plant, as up to 120 tons of contaminated water seems to have leaked into the soil below a storage tank.

About 400 tons of groundwater flow into the reactor buildings each day, continually amplifying the amount of contaminated water that must be managed.

Consequently, TEPCO has been rapidly setting up new tanks and reservoirs on-site to store the increasing volume of water.

As one of the underground reservoir tanks is now not in service due to the leak, the company will have to accelerate its plan to construct a new tank, a senior official at TEPCO said.

At the power plant, TEPCO processes highly contaminated water leaking from nuclear reactors through a device to remove radioactive cesium.

After the cesium is removed, part of the leaked water is used to cool nuclear reactors at the plant.

TEPCO stores excess water in tanks and reservoirs as it cannot release the water into the sea because of the suspected presence of other radioactive substances.

According to TEPCO, the existing tanks, which have a capacity of 325,300 tons, currently hold 271,800 tons of water.

However, the remaining capacity was reduced to 14,000 tons due to the recent leak. This is equivalent to approximately one month's worth of groundwater flowing into the reactor buildings.

"If groundwater continues to enter the buildings at this pace, the existing tanks are expected to reach capacity in about three months," the TEPCO official said.

The company started transferring the contaminated water in the problematic tank to an adjacent reservoir early Saturday.

Masayuki Ono, senior TEPCO official in charge of securing suitable locations for nuclear power plants, said at a press conference in Tokyo on Saturday morning that the company has no concrete plans for the tank after it is repaired.

Each time the plant nears its storage capacity, the company has to build more tanks and reservoirs.

Through deforestation of some areas around the plant, it has secured a place to set up new tanks. The latest tank TEPCO is building will have a capacity of 400,000 tons. The construction work is scheduled for completion in October, a TEPCO official said.

"The current conditions for storing contaminated water are very severe. We need to devise a long-term plan for treating contaminated water," Ono said. "We'd like to set up a new tank quickly to avoid a situation in which there's nowhere to store contaminated water."