Japan Temporarily Halts Radioactive Water Cleaning System at Fukushima

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RIA Novosti, PUBLISHED 21.05.2014

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan announced it had temporarily suspended all the three lines of the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), the NHK channel reported Tuesday.

According to NHK, the operator was forced to halt the work of the system after it revealed a failure of radioactive water cleaning process. TEPCO has not yet released an official confirmation.

ALPS was designed to clean tainted water from 62 types of radioactive particles, barring tritium (isotope of hydrogen). After undergoing the cleaning process part of the water is used to cool the reactors and the rest is pumped into storage tanks.

TEPCO launched a test run of the water treatment system in 2013 but made a decision to halt the system after revealing water leakage caused by corrosion in one of its lines. Test operation of the system resumed in November 2013 with TEPCO’s planning to start full operation of ALPS in 2014.

In March 2011, Japan was hit by a massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, claiming more than 15,000 lives and causing a number of explosions at the Fukushima plant. In what has been dubbed the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, three of the plant’s reactors underwent a partial meltdown as radiation leaked into the atmosphere, soil and seawater.

300 tons of water with strontium levels equaling 80 million becquerels per liter leaked from a storage reservoir into the Pacific Ocean. The leak was then classified as a level three incident on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).

Topics: NPP Fukushima Daiichi

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