Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) has accumulated the largest pool of radioactive water in the history of nuclear accidents. The utility must now decide what to do with it: dump in the ocean, evaporate into the air, or both.
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The government said this week it will take a bigger role in staunching the toxic outflow thats grown to 40 times the volume accumulated in the atomic disaster at Three Mile Island in the U.S.
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Processing and disposing of the water, enough to fill 132 Olympic-size swimming pools, will be one of the most challenging engineering tasks of our generation, former nuclear engineer Michael Friedlander said. Tokyo Electric has chopped down forest to add more water tanks at the site 220 kilometers (137 miles) northeast of Tokyo.
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The steel storage tanks are vulnerable to spills due to earthquakes as well as leaks, representing a very clear and present danger to the plant site and to the people working there, said Friedlander, who spent 13 years operating U.S. nuclear plants, including the Crystal River Station in Florida.
There are really only a few ways you can get rid of it, Friedlander said. You put it in the ocean or its going to have to be evaporated. Its a political hotspot, but at some point you cannot just continue collecting this water.
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Tepco has 300 tons of water flowing into the reactors each day for cooling, while another 400 tons of groundwater from hills behind the plant is seeping into basements and mixing with contaminated run-off. Tepco is then pumping hundreds of tons out of the basements each day to store in tanks to await treatment to extract cesium and strontium via two filter systems.
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