With worries about radioactive rainfall on the rise due to the nuclear disaster in nearby Japan, scores of South Korean schools canceled classes on Thursday amid showers across much of the country.
As Reuters reports, South Korean officials were careful to say that the health risk was not a concern at present radiation levels, but they nonetheless advised schools to refrain from outdoor activities. School boards largely left it up to individual principals to decide whether to remain open or close their doors, and roughly 150 decided not to open.
“We are geographically closer to Japan than others like the United States or Europe,” South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said. “People are bound to be more worried.”
Many residents of South Korea, which is Japan’s closest neighbor, wore face masks as a preventive measure, and roads clogged around schools that were open, as more parents drove their children to school rather than letting them walk.
Separately, as the Los Angeles Times reports, officials at Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant face an unprecedented challenge: the disposal of the millions of gallons of wastewater used to keep the reactors from overheating after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that knocked the plant’s cooling system.
With an estimated 15 million gallons of highly radioactive water that have collected in tunnels and makeshift pools beneath the facility, officials worry that it could take many years, even decades, to clean up the aftermath of the disaster.
“There is nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before,” Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Energy Department, told the Times.
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