Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant leaking contaminated water

[NBCNews]

  By ReutersAs much as 120 tons of radioactive water may have leaked from a storage  tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, contaminating the  surrounding ground, Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Saturday.

The  power company has yet to discover the cause of the leak, detected on  one of seven tanks that store water used to cool the plants reactors, a  spokesman for the company, Masayuki Ono, said at a press briefing.

The company plans to pump 13,000 cubic meters of water remaining in the tank to other vessels over the next two weeks.  


Water  from the leaking tank, which is located 800 meters from the coast, is not  expected to reach the sea, Kyodo news wire reported, earlier, citing  unidentified officials from the utility.

Follow @NBCNewsWorldThe company did not say how long the tank had been leaking.

The  operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant has faced a range of problems  with controlling ground water and maintaining the massive cooling system  built to keep the reactors stable.

The power company said on  Friday said it lost the ability to cool radioactive fuel rods in one of  the plant's reactors for about three hours. It was the second failure of  the system to circulate seawater to cool spent fuel rods at the plant  in the past three weeks.

The facility was the site of the worst  nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in March 2011 when a magnitude 9.0  earthquake triggered a tsunami that destroyed back-up generators and  disabled its cooling system. Three of the reactors melted down.

The  storage tanks, pits excavated at the site in the wake of the disaster,  are lined with water proof sheets meant to keep the contaminated water  from leaking into the soil

Work to decommission the plant is projected to take decades to complete.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

NBC News