Giant barge arrives at Fukushima plant to store radioactive water

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RIA Novosti, PUBLISHED May 21, 2011

A giant water-storage barge has arrived at Japan's quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to store highly radioactive waste water from the basement of a reactor building, Kyodo news reported on Saturday.

The plant was heavily damaged by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) will use the 136-meter-long, 46-meter-wide Megafloat as a storage site for contaminated waste water leaked from reactor buildings.

Reactor 1 suffered a near complete core meltdown in the March disaster, allowing 3,000 tons of water to leak into its basement.

Fuel rods at reactors 2 and 3 may also have largely melted.

TEPCO engineers have been pouring water into the reactors water to cool them in a bid to gain access to reactor buildings to restore the damaged cooling systems.

They have now scrapped the plan and are trying to create a cooling system by circulating the water which is already in the reactors.

The president of TEPCO, Masataka Shimizu, resigned on Friday after the company reported a record loss of $15.3 billion for the past financial year.

Thousands of people have been evacuated from a 20-kilometer no-go area around the plant, and TEPCO has been charged with paying compensation to families and businesses displaced by the country's worst nuclear crisis.

Topics: NPP Fukushima Daiichi

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