(UPDATED with Diagrams) Real Leak of at Least 300 Tonnes of Highly Contaminated Water (Fukushima)

ex-skf.blogspot.com ^ | August 19, 2013 | Ex-skf Blogger

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Real Leak of at Least 300 Tonnes of Really Highly Contaminated Water at #Fukushima I Nuke Plant, and Leak Continues

As the world's mainstream media and alternative media suddenly rediscover Fukushima I Nuke Plant over the "assumption" by a career bureaucrat at Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (whose Agency of Natural Resources and Energy oversees the decommissioning of the plant) that "300 tonnes of highly contaminated [sic] water" may be leaking every day, a real leak of actual waste water with extremely high beta nuclides has been found.

According to TEPCO, who held an ad hoc press conference at noon on August 20, 2013, at least 300 tonnes of waste water after the cesium absorption (by SARRY) and desalination (by Reverse Osmosis Apparatus) has leaked from a huge 1,000-tonne steel tank (or two, they don't know yet), and it is likely that the waste water is STILL LEAKING as TEPCO hasn't been able to identify the location of the leak(s).

Information about the leak, from Jiji Tsushin

Leak from a group of 1,000-tonne steel tanks (tank is 12 meters in diameter, 11-meter high) in the area H4 which has total 26 tanks. The location is about 500 meters from the embankment.

One of the tanks in this particular group (No.5 in the group I in H4 area, or H4-I-5) was found with the water level that was 3.4-meter lower than before.

Nature of contaminated water: waste water after cesium absorption and desalination (called by TEPCO RO water)

Estimated amount of contaminated water: 300 tonnes (300,000 liters)

Density of radioactive materials (TEPCO's announcement is in Bq/cm3, as it is highly contaminated water; Jiji Tsushin reports the number in Bq/liter):

All-beta including strontium: 80 million Bq/L (80,000 Bq/cm3)

Radioactive cesium: 146,000 Bq/L (146 Bq/cm3)

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This tank leak is in addition to underground leaks thought to be of equal size.

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From the comments:

Anonymous said...

So, let me get this clear. Extremely contaminated water you store in tanks that has a life span UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES of 5 years... Was it a sale or so? Get 4 tanks for the price of 3?
What was the plan behind this deciscion to use these tanks? Is there actually any plan or vision from Tepco?
I read that these huge tanks are filled in about 3 days and if you have to keep doing that for the next 40 years, you need 4800 of these tanks, with a life span of max 5 years... How is Tepco going to deal with that?

Why are these questions never asked ( by journalists ) to Tepco?
August 20, 2013 at 2:30 AM

[Mr. K]

think of a cube about the size of a very small house

Thats how much water this is

I would think you could flush that into the ocean and barely notice it

[ransomnote]

I wish your analogy was useful. Look at the pictures of the storage tanks at the link, the thousands of gallons of highly contaminated water in each, the fact that the tanks have a “life span” of 5 years but tens of thousands of them would be needed to hold the contaminated water....

Fish taken off trawlers in San Diego had, according to a Wood’s Hole marine biologist, traces of Fukushima radiation. He sampled 13 fish and all 13 were contaminated...off the coast of San Diego. And that was fall of 2011. It’s been about 24 months since that sample was taken, 5 times more contamination (estimated - 5 months of continuous leaking from underground and flowing into the ocean x5 would be roughly 25months) has been dumped in the ocean and there is no plan for stopping it.

[RS_Rider]

Any chance the water in these thanks is being recirculated through the area it is providing cooling to?

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Mr. K.

My apologies for my rude reply. I misread your post initially. Having read it completely, I still disagree with you strongly but would have made my original response to you less...ahem...terse.

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HEre’s the post about the tainted fish in San Diego.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32139/title/Fish-Transport-Fukushima-Radiation/

The radioactive waste which contaminates seaweed enters the food chain (fish eaten by fish etc.) and concentrates in the larger predators which we tend to eat. There are alot of ways radiation in the ocean bad, the food web is one example.

[BenLurkin]

Good point.

There are a half dozen or so nuclear submarines at the bottom of the sea. Nobody seems very concerned about radiation from those reactors.

[Mr. K]

really..!

Take a container of the stuff and sink it into the Marianas trench and let nature takes its course

(although that is where I think Godzilla may have originally come from)

[Sawdring]

Why don’t the Japanese do what the ancient aliens did near the Nile? Just build a stone pyramid over each reactor site. ;)

[Procyon]

From your link:

"Bluefin tuna fish caught off the California coast are indeed safe to eat: the levels of radioactive cesium found in the tuna, between 5-10 becquerels (Bq), are far below the Japanese-set seafood safety limit of 100 Bq/kg, which was just reduced from 500 Bq/kg in April. And the levels are also lower than doses of naturally occurring isotopes in fish, such as radioactive potassium and polonium, said Buesseler."

So while things appear a little hairy around Fukushima, we can relax on this side of the ocean.

[McGruff]

Mothra can take out Godzilla but where did Mothra come from?

[Seraphicaviary]

And don’t forget all the Soviet subs that were dumping off the Sea of Japan for decades. There is probably some stuff left from them.

[Salgak]

Exactly. That’s a cube of water roughly 51 feet across. A year’s worth might be the equivalent of a drop of water in an Olympic swimming pool.

[Procyon]

We don't know what the half-life spans are of the isotopes because they are not identified. They talk about Beta-decay products (including nasty Strontium-90) of 80 million Bq/L which only gives the current decay rate and not any half-lifes. So I don't know the level of worry. How much of the decay is not Strontium-90?

I'm not clear on where this water came from and if it will be recirculated. I'm guessing (because it had to be desalinated) that this comes from the sea water that they drowned the reactor in as an emergency cooling measure. What was the total volume of sea water used to fill the reactor and containment vessel? We don't get the straight doper from TEPCO and are forced to rely upon the anti-nuke greenies or media sensationalists. Where do we go for unbiased expert opinion?

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Uhmmm....no. It isn’t safe to eat. Patients in a hospital are given radioactive isotope tracers as a trade off - the patient signs a waiver acknowledging that even low level doses of radiation increase the risk of cancer but that the value of the diagnostic test outweighs the increased risk of cancer.
THere’s a video of a medical director of isotope treatments in Japan wherein he points out that isoptopes concentrate in different locations in the body based on the type of isotope and that drinking water containing 2 bequerels per liter (cesium) were shown to cause bladder cancer. Japan’s safety limits were raised when Fukushima happened. So were US safety limits. All that changed is that the countries are now accepting greater risks in their definition of ‘safe’.
Medical research dating back to the 1950’s demonstrates that there is no safe limit. To keep the populace from objecting to damaging effects of radioactive waste, the governments and nuke industries simply declare it safe.

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:)

I think the pyramid isn’t working over there. The radiation is still escaping in ground water and steam.

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The blogger at the link site described the water:

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

Anon at 12:05PM, this water is waste water. Cooling cycle: water injected into reactors to cool corium—>water gets contaminated—>contaminated water goes from the basements of reactor buildings to the basements of turbine buildings through ducts/cracks (no one knows exactly what)—>contaminated water is pumped from the turbine building basements to the buildings dedicated to store the contaminated water —>contaminated water goes to SARRY (cesium absorption)—>contaminated water without much cesium but lots of chloride and alpha and beta nuclides goes to RO Apparatus for desalination, some nuclides get removed in the process —>the treated water goes to the reactors to cool corium, the waste water after RO, which has a lot of chloride and beta nuclides, goes to these tanks.

[ransomnote]

If humans are exposed to ionizing radiation, damage results. Sometimes it is genetic damage that is not expressed beyond the individual or offspring. Sometimes it is genetic damage that only shows up later in the offspring. There are obscure illnesses documented from the Ukraine following the Chernobyl disaster. Increased early dementia, cardiac death, leukemia and cancer along with “a host of other illnesses” and leaps in all illnesses as a result of depressed immune response.

It’s safe to say that if nuke sub reactor material gets into the food chain, then it causes damage for the remaining time it undergoes radioactive decay. But increases in illnesses in the human population would exist but not be identifiable has having come from a specific source.