TEPCO finds new spot of leaked toxic water
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E-mail Xinhua, September 10, 2013
Runner of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), said Monday it detected a new site with leaked toxic water in the complex, immediately after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the issue is under control.
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File photo of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. |
TEPCO detected that 3,200 becquerels per liter of radioactive materials in a well near a leaky water storage tank in the stricken facility, according to local media, adding the radioactive substances emitting strontium and other beta rays were detected in samples taken Sunday.
The new leaky site raises the possibility that toxic water has reached groundwater at the plant, which was crippled by tsunami in March 2011, said Japan's Kyodo News Agency.
In Sunday's International Olympic Committee meeting held in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, Abe assured to the world that the contaminated water leakage in Fukushima was under control, helping Tokyo win the right to host the 2020 summer Olympics.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that it will dispatch a team of nuclear experts to Japan in autumn to investigate the toxic water issue.
Yukiya Amano, director general of the IAEA, said that the massive buildup of radioactive water at the power plant was a problem that needed to be coped with urgently, said Kyodo.
According to a latest poll released Monday, the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's response to an ongoing leak at the stricken nuclear power plant was too late.
The poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said that 72 percent of those surveyed said the government's response to an escalating crisis at the nuclear plant in Japan's northeast was " late".
In addition, 95 percent of the respondents described the situation as "serious", with 72 percent of that number stating that it was "very serious" and 23 percent saying it was "serious to some degree".
TEPCO recently admitted that 300 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank, some of which could have flowed into the adjacent Pacific Ocean.
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