Tainted water leaks from plant

SEOUL, South Korea – More than 45 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from Japan’s earthquake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant over the weekend, and some of the water might have reached the nearby Pacific Ocean, the utility that operates the plant said.

The leak counteracts assurances that the Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, has largely controlled damage at the coastal nuclear plant, which it plans to shut down completely by year’s end.

According to a statement on the utility’s website, workers on Sunday morning found that radioactive water was pooling in a runoff container near a purification device.

The system was shut down and the leak apparently stopped, but workers later found highly radioactive water leaking from cracks in the container’s concrete wall into a gutter that leads to the ocean. Employees stemmed the leak with sandbags.

On March 11, the 1970s-era plant was hit by an earthquake-triggered tsunami that knocked out its cooling system, eventually leading to several reactor-core meltdowns. The disaster, which experts have called the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, has threatened fisheries in the region and caused 80,000 residents near the facility to be moved.

Since March, utility engineers have attempted to cool the plant’s reactors by flooding them with water, which becomes contaminated with radioactivity in the process.

Tepco installed a new circulatory cooling system in September, with filters that decontaminate and recycle the cooling water. The company acknowledges that some water has already leaked into the ocean and that thousands of tons more remain in the flooded basements of the plant’s reactor buildings.

The newspaper Asahi Shimbun quoted Tepco officials as saying that as much as 220 tons of water may now have leaked from the damaged facility since the disaster.