By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: April 29, 2013
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Kyodo News, via Associated Press
Gray and silver storage tanks filled with radioactive waste water
are sprawling over the grounds of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
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TOKYO — Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s
second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater
that workers are struggling to contain.
Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a
rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated
there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling
system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous
flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver
storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The
tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.
But even they are not enough to handle the tons of strontium-laced water
at the plant — a reflection of the scale of the 2011 disaster and, in
critics’ view, ad hoc decision making by the company that runs the plant
and the regulators who oversee it. In a sign of the sheer size of the
problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company,
or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to
make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when
underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent
weeks.
“The water keeps increasing every minute, no matter whether we eat,
sleep or work,” said Masayuki Ono, a general manager with Tepco who acts
as a company spokesman. “It feels like we are constantly being chased,
but we are doing our best to stay a step in front.”
While the company has managed to stay ahead, the constant threat of
running out of storage space has turned into what Tepco itself called an
emergency, with the sheer volume of water raising fears of future leaks
at the seaside plant that could reach the Pacific Ocean.
That quandary along with an embarrassing string of mishaps — including a 29-hour power failure
affecting another, less vital cooling system — have underscored an
alarming reality: two years after the meltdowns, the plant remains
vulnerable to the same sort of large earthquake and tsunami that set the
original calamity in motion.
There is no question that the Fukushima plant is less dangerous than it
was during the desperate first months after the accident, mostly through
the determined efforts of workers who have stabilized the melted
reactor cores, which are cooler and less dangerous than they once were.
But many experts warn that safety systems and fixes at the plant remain makeshift and prone to accidents.
The jury-rigged cooling loop that pours water over the damaged reactor
cores is a mazelike collection of pumps, filters and pipes that snake
two and a half miles along the ground through the plant. And a pool for
storing used nuclear fuel remains perched on the fifth floor of a
damaged reactor building as Tepco struggles to move the rods to a safer
location.
The situation is worrisome enough that Shunichi Tanaka, a longtime
nuclear power proponent who is the chairman of the newly created
watchdog Nuclear Regulation Authority, told reporters after the
announcement of the leaking pits that “there is concern that we cannot
prevent another accident.”
A growing number of government officials and advisers now say that by
entrusting the cleanup to the company that ran the plant before the
meltdowns, Japanese leaders paved the way for a return to the
insider-dominated status quo that prevailed before the disaster.
Even many scientists who acknowledge the complexity of cleaning up the
worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl fear that the water crisis is
just the latest sign that Tepco is lurching from one problem to the next
without a coherent strategy.
“Tepco is clearly just hanging on day by day, with no time to think
about tomorrow, much less next year,” said Tadashi Inoue, an expert in
nuclear power who served on a committee that drew up the road map for
cleaning up the plant.
But the concerns extend well beyond Tepco. While doing a more rigorous job of policing Japan’s
nuclear industry than regulators before the accident, the Nuclear
Regulation Authority has a team of just nine inspectors to oversee the
more than 3,000 workers at Fukushima.
And a separate committee created by the government to oversee the
cleanup is loaded with industry insiders, including from the Ministry of
Trade, in charge of promoting nuclear energy,
and nuclear reactor manufacturers like Toshiba and Hitachi. The story
of how the Fukushima plant ended up swamped with water, critics say, is a
cautionary tale about the continued dangers of leaving decisions about
nuclear safety to industry insiders.
When Tepco and the government devised the current plans for
decommissioning the plant in late 2011, groundwater had already been
identified as a problem — the plant lies in the path of water flowing
from nearby mountains to the sea. But decision makers placed too low a
priority on the problem, critics say, assuming the water could be stored
until it could be cleaned and disposed of.
According to some who helped the government plan the cleanup, outside
experts might have predicted the water problem, but Tepco and the
government swatted away entreaties to bring in such experts or companies
with more cleanup expertise, preferring to keep control of the plant
within the collusive nuclear industry.
Tepco also rejected a proposal to build a concrete wall running more
than 60 feet into the ground to block water from reaching the reactors
and turbine buildings, and the Trade Ministry did not force the issue,
according to experts and regulators who helped draw up the
decommissioning plan.
Instead, Tepco made interim adjustments, including hastily building the plastic- and clay-lined underground water storage pits that eventually developed leaks.
It was only after the discovery of those leaks that the regulation
agency was added as a full-fledged member to the government’s cleanup
oversight committee.
But the biggest problem, critics say, was that Tepco and other members
of the oversight committee appeared to assume all along that they would
eventually be able to dump the contaminated water into the ocean once a
powerful new filtering system was put in place that could remove 62
types of radioactive particles, including strontium.
The dumping plans have now been thwarted by what some experts say was a
predictable problem: a public outcry over tritium, a relatively weak
radioactive isotope that cannot be removed from the water.
Tritium, which can be harmful only if ingested, is regularly released
into the environment by normally functioning nuclear plants, but even
Tepco acknowledges that the water at Fukushima contains about 100 times
the amount of tritium released in an average year by a healthy plant.
“We were so focused on the fuel rods and melted reactor cores that we
underestimated the water problem,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman
of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, a government body that helped
draw up Tepco’s original cleanup plan. “Someone from outside the
industry might have foreseen the water problem.”
Tepco rejects the criticism that it has mishandled the growing
groundwater problem, saying that the only way to safely stop the inflow
is by plugging the cracks in the damaged reactor buildings. It contends
that no company in the world has the ability to do that because it would
require entering the highly radioactive buildings and working in
dangerously toxic water several feet deep.
“We operate the plant, so we know it better than anyone else,” said Mr.
Ono, the Tepco spokesman. He then teared up, adding, “Fixing this mess
that we made is the only way we can regain the faith of society.”
For the moment, that goal seems distant. The public outcry over the
plans to dump tritium-tainted water into the sea — driven in part by the
company’s failure to inform the public in 2011 when it dumped
radioactive water into the Pacific — was so loud that Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe personally intervened last month to say that there would be
“no unsafe release.”
Meanwhile, the amount of water stored at the plant just keeps growing.
“How could Tepco not realize that it had to get public approval before
dumping this into the sea?” said Muneo Morokuzu, an expert on public
policy at the University of Tokyo who has called for creating a
specialized new company just to run the cleanup. “This all just goes to
show that Tepco is in way over its head.”
