Japan earthquake: Radioactive leak into ocean 'stopped' Skip to main content

Japan earthquake: Radioactive leak into ocean 'stopped'

A worker points to a crack in a concrete pit near Fukushima Daiichi's No 2 reactor, 2 April The concrete pit near Reactor No 2 was cracked by the quake

Japan quake

A leak of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean from Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been stopped, its operator reports.
Tepco said it had injected chemical agents to solidify soil near a cracked pit, from where the contaminated water had been seeping out.
Engineers have been struggling to stop leaks since the plant was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March.
Japan has asked Russia for the use of a floating radiation treatment plant.
In another development, government sources said that a plan to cover the damaged reactor buildings with special metal sheets could not be carried out until September at the earliest due to high-level radioactivity hampering work at the site.
The official death toll from the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami stands at more than 12,000 with some 15,000 people still unaccounted for, and more than 161,000 people still living in evacuation centres.
'Water glass' Samples of water used to cool one of the plant's six reactors, No 2, showed 5m times the legal limit of radioactivity, officials said on Tuesday.
The Landysh moored near Vladivostok (archive image from 2004) The Landysh (Suzuran) is used to decommission nuclear submarines
In order to stem the leak, Tepco (the Tokyo Electric Power Co) injected ''water glass'', or sodium silicate, and another agent near a seaside pit where the highly radioactive water had been seeping through.
Desperate engineers had also used sawdust, newspapers and concrete to try to stop the escaping water.
The company still needs to pump some 11,500 tonnes of low-level radioactive seawater into the sea because of a lack of storage space at the plant.
But officials said this water would not pose a significant threat to human health.
Russia's nuclear agency Rosatom said it was awaiting answers to some questions before granting Japan's request to lend its vessel the Landysh, known in Japanese as the Suzuran, which is used to decommission Russian nuclear submarines in the far eastern port of Vladivostok.
One of the world's largest liquid radioactive waste treatment plants, the Landysh treats radioactive liquid with chemicals and stores it in a cement form.
It can process 35 cubic metres of liquid waste a day and 7,000 cubic metres a year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12981243
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chronology of the Press in Burma

1836 – 1846 * During this period the first English-language newspaper was launched under British-ruled Tenasserim, southern  Burma . The first ethnic Karen-language and Burmese-language newspapers also appear in this period.     March 3, 1836 —The first English-language newspaper,  The Maulmain Chronicle , appears in the city of Moulmein in British-ruled Tenasserim. The paper, first published by a British official named E.A. Blundell, continued up until the 1950s. September 1842 —Tavoy’s  Hsa-tu-gaw  (the  Morning Star ), a monthly publication in the Karen-language of  Sgaw ,  is established by the Baptist mission. It is the first ethnic language newspaper. Circulation reached about three hundred until its publication ceased in 1849. January 1843 —The Baptist mission publishes a monthly newspaper, the Christian  Dhamma  Thadinsa  (the  Religious Herald ), in Moulmein. Supposedly the first Burmese-language newspaper, it continued up until the first year of the second Angl
Post a Comment
Read more

ARSA claims ambush on Myanmar security forces

Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on Sunday claimed responsibility for an ambush on Myanmar security forces that left several wounded in northern Rakhine state, the first attack in weeks in a region gutted by violence. Rakhine was plunged into turmoil last August, when a series of ARSA raids prompted a military backlash so brutal the UN says it likely amounts to ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority. The army campaign sent some 650,000 Rohingya fleeing for Bangladesh, where refugees have given harrowing accounts of rape, murder and arson at the hands of security forces and vigilantes. Myanmar's military, which tightly controls information about Rakhine, denies any abuses and insists the crackdown was a proportionate response to crush the "terrorist" threat. ARSA have launched few attacks in recent months.  But the army reported that "about ten" Rohingya terrorists ambushed a car with hand-made mines and gunfire on Friday morning
Post a Comment
Read more

Thai penis whitening trend raises eyebrows

Image copyright LELUXHOSPITAL Image caption Authorities warn the procedure could be quite painful A supposed trend of penis whitening has captivated Thailand in recent days and left it asking if the country's beauty industry is taking things too far. Skin whitening is nothing new in many Asian countries, where darker skin is often associated with outdoor labour, therefore, being poorer. But even so, when a clip of a clinic's latest intriguing procedure was posted online, it quickly went viral. Thailand's health ministry has since issued a warning over the procedure. The BBC Thai service spoke to one patient who had undergone the treatment, who told them: "I wanted to feel more confident in my swimming briefs". The 30-year-old said his first session of several was two months ago, and he had since seen a definite change in the shade. 'What for?' The original Facebook post from the clinic offering the treatment, which uses lasers to break do
1 comment
Read more