Japanese crews have plugged a leak around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that was thought to be the source of highly radioactive water in the nearby Pacific Ocean.
As the BBC reports, officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the Fukushima plant, say that the cracked cement pit from which the water was escaping was plugged by injecting 1,500 liters of chemicals into the surrounding soil.
While Tepco officials are optimistic that the plug will hold, questions remain. “We are not relieved yet,” said Yukio Edano, the government’s chief cabinet secretary. “We are checking whether the leak has completely stopped, or whether there may be other leaks.”
Tepco has used seawater to cool reactors that dangerously overheated. That left large pools of radioactive wastewater in and around the reactors, leading to the recent major leak.
With that leak now plugged, Tepco officials are releasing 11,500 tons of less radioactive water back out into the ocean, so that the more contaminated water can be stored.
Officials said that the water being discharged into the sea would not pose an environmental health threat, though area fishermen disagreed, calling the action “utterly outrageous” and charging the government with threatening their livelihoods.
The threat to the fishing industry is not just speculative. As Bloomberg reports, fishing off the coast of Ibaraki prefecture, was almost entirely suspended Tuesday after contaminated sand lance fish were discovered south of Fukushima. Ibaraki is the nation’s fifth-largest seafood producer.
In addition to the water leak, engineers around Fukushima are dealing with a new problem: a build-up of hydrogen in one of the plant’s six reactors, which increases the risk of explosions inside the containment building. Officials said that they were considering injecting nitrogen gas into the No. 1 reactor to stabilize the situation.
In the days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which knocked out the power at Fukushima and caused the cooling system to fail, a buildup of hydrogen caused explosions in three of the six reactors.
Separately, a just-released report from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission raised concerns about continuing problems at the Fukushima plant, including some that could be worsened by the efforts to bring the disaster under control. According to the The New York Times, the containment buildings holding tons of radioactive water are now more vulnerable to rupture in an aftershock earthquake.
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