By TAKURO YAMANO/ Staff Writer
May 18, 2022 at 18:14 JST
The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
The Nuclear Regulation Authority on May 18 approved Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s plan to discharge treated but still contaminated water from its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant into the sea.
The government watchdog, which was established after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, will give the plan the official green light after soliciting public opinion on it.
TEPCO has been plagued by the constant accumulation of highly contaminated water at the complex following the plant's triple meltdown triggered by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The power company moves the water into storage tanks once it has treated most of the highly radioactive material with special equipment known as the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS).
But unless it does something with all the water it is collecting, it will eventually run out of space for it.
In December 2021, TEPCO submitted its plan to discharge the water about 1 kilometer offshore from the plant using an undersea tunnel.
Before releasing the water into the sea, the company plans to mix it with seawater to dilute tritium, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that the special equipment cannot remove. TEPCO will dilute it to less than one-40th of the statutory standards before it discharges the water.
According to TEPCO, the volume of radioactive water from the plant grew at a rate of roughly 130 tons a day in fiscal 2021, which ended in March. The company estimates the tanks will be full sometime around the summer or autumn of 2023.
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