And new problems arise for troubled Daichi nuclear power plants.
The operator is having difficulty pumping water into destroyed reactors at the Fukushima No 1 plant, tanks are rapidly filling with radioactive water, and hundreds of potentially volatile uranium fuel assemblies remain in a precarious storage pool that some warn could collapse in another strong earthquake.
But Tokyo Electric Power Co is working on solving those problems, with plans to build new storage tanks, to erect an overhead crane to lift the fuel, and to decommission the destroyed reactors within 40 years.
Cooling the reactors produces about 450 tons of radioactive water daily. Some of that water is treated and reused as coolant, but as of September 4 storage tanks at the site held about 200,000 tons of contaminated water.
TEPCO plans to build more tanks to increase the overall capacity to 700,000 tons.
Meanwhile, the volume of water pumped into the pressure vessels of the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors fell below a mandated minimum level on Aug. 30, for the first time since immediately after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami….
From Asahi Shimbun AJW, the new English language version of Japan's leading daily newspaper.
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