War on Contaminated Water

Without significant technological breakthrough, contaminated water produced in the process of cooling down the broken reactors in First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant is still increasing by 400 metric tons a day. Nobody has seen the end state of the effort. Nobody knows whether we can reach a goal. The Japanese are endlessly paying the price of the nuclear accident.

Tokyo Electric Power Company revealed that Advanced Liquid Processing System for purifying contaminated water in the First Fukushima stopped again on Tuesday. ALPS was designed for extracting all sixty-three kinds of radioactive materials, except Tritium, from water contaminated by melted-down nuclear fuel rods and mixed with underground water. TEPCO found that radioactive materials in processed water were diluted only to the level of one tenth from unprocessed status, while ordinary processing was reaching to one hundred thousandth. The company explained that something had been wrong in changing filter earlier this month.

As indicated, the process to maintain broken reactors by cooling them with water is not working well. This only increases contaminated water. To deal with it, TEPCO decided to purify huge amount of water. But the idea has repeatedly been facing unpredicted technological loopholes, the failure which can be resembled incompletion of nuclear recycle project in Japan.

Where “purified water” is going? TEPCO proposed to throw it away to the sea. Fishermen around the plant strongly opposed the idea, anticipating negative impact of the water with Tritium on marine products they would catch.

Meanwhile, unpurified water is still flowing through underground. To block it, TEPCO is building “frozen wall” underground surrounding the site, which requires constant supply of electrical power. The depth of the wall will be about 90 feet. The thickness of crust of the Earth is 90,000 feet. No one has explained how that shallow underground wall on the surface of the crust would work for containing liquidated radioactive materials with unpredictable move.

The strategy is too much relying on technology to avoid further damage on civilization stemming from the unprecedented disaster. The world needs to be fearful about the possibility of total breakdown of the strategy. Again, huge amount of contaminated water is stocked in thousands of tanks, water purification system and underground. The consequence of collapse, which may be brought by another big earthquake, will be unprecedented pollution of seawater. As long as seeing the measures taken by TEPCO, it is inevitable to conclude that leaders of the company are going to leak all the contaminated water to the sea, while they are blinding the world with baseless technological explanations.