[ad_1]
The Japanese government has decided that radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant can be discharged into the sea. This is reported by various Japanese media.
The formal decision will be released later this month. The operator Tokio Electric (Tepco) has stored several million tons of contaminated water at the site of the nuclear power plant, which was destroyed by a tsunami in 2011.
Since then, reactors must be water-cooled to avoid core meltdown. Tepco had announced that there would be no more storage capacity in 2022. Therefore, the proposal from the sea has come up again and again in recent years. Now apparently it is supposed to be implemented.
Tepco is likely to receive resistance from neighboring South Korea, but also from local fishermen. They fear damaging their image by Fukushima’s seafood. The danger posed by contaminated water is controversial. With the exception of tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope, the company is already filtering out many dangerous substances. Tritium is considered comparatively harmless.
In the spring of 2019, the company had started to recover fuel rods from one of the destroyed reactors. The remote control devices took the radioactively contaminated fuels from the destroyed nuclear power plant, according to Tepco. Initially, the focus was on seven unused fuel rods from the spent fuel in reactor 3.
30,000 residents are still waiting for their return
Reactors 1 to 3 were destroyed on March 11, 2011 as a result of an earthquake and tsunami. Because the cooling system failed, there was a meltdown. About 160,000 residents had to flee because of the radioactive radiation. Around 30,000 still cannot return. The accident was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
In 2014, Tepco had already completed the recovery of the fuel rods from reactor 4. Originally, the fuel rods had to be removed from reactor 3. However, the situation there is much more complicated than at reactor 4. In the pool of decomposition with fuel there was an explosion in the course of the nuclear power plant accident. It took four years to clear the debris from the road.
