There’s a building boom going on at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan where on March 11, 2011, as the coast was catastrophically flooded by an earthquake-triggered tsunami, three of the six reactors melted down.
But it’s not the kind that signals progress.
Tepco, which owns the site, has built hundreds of massive storage tanks to hold the radioactive water that is leaking from the disaster.
According to a report by Vince Beiser at Wired, the tanks contain as much as 150 tons of groundwater that percolates into the reactors through cracks in their foundations every day.
The water is contaminated with radioactive isotopes during the process, the report said.
“More than one million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks – and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them,” Beiser warned.
To contain the radiation as much as possible, Tepco “pumps it out and runs it through a massive filtering system housed in a building the size of a small aircraft hangar.”
“Inside are arrays of seven-foot tall stainless steel tubes, filled with sand grain-like particles that perform a process called ion exchange. The particles grab on to ions of cesium, strontium, and other dangerous isotopes in the water, making room for them by spitting out sodium. The highly toxic sludge created as a byproduct is stored elsewhere on the site in thousands of sealed canisters.”
The report explained there have been improvements in the filtering system since the disaster seven years ago, but none of the processes so far has been able to catch tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.