Paul Lawrance
Activist Post
TEPCO is moving forward with its plan to build a underground wall of ice to limit toxic water contamination in the basements of the Fukushima nuclear plant reactor buildings after its severe wounding in 2011.
Testing aimed at gathering technical information to assess the risk involved in the project is underway as the level of toxic water at the plant builds to 400 tonnes a day.
The plan, which was first made public in September of last year, is to pump coolant through piping deep into the ground to create a 1.4 kilometer (0.9 mile) rectangular wall.
Dale Klein, who chairs Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee, says there is doubt that the ice will be completely effective due to the untested assumptions about the site’s hydrology, reports Bloomberg News.
If the project is fully committed to by the mangers of the Fukushima plant it is expected to be completed by March 2015 and remain in operation through 2020, a TEPCO spokeswoman told Bloomberg.
The forwarding of the containment effort comes on the heels of a report finding that Albacore tuna caught off the Oregon coast have seen a slight elevation in levels of radioactivity since the meltdown.
Although the levels of radioactivity in the tuna were found to “match the amount of radiation the average person is annually exposed to in everyday life through cosmic rays, the air, the ground, X-rays and other sources,” it sheds light on how the disaster’s side effects are not limited to Japan.
Paul Lawrance writes for Eyes Open Report, where this first appeared.
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