Japan raises severity rating for Fukushima leaks

The Nuclear Regulation Agency announced that it was upgrading the problem to a Level Three from Level One on the seven point scale announced on Monday and suggested that the problem was “in some respects” too serious for the operator of the facility, Tokyo Electric Power Co, to handle.

“The current situation is at the point where more surveillance will not be enough to keep the accidents from happening,” Shunichi Tanaka, the chairman of the NRA, said. “Our job now is to reduce the risk of these accidents becoming fatal.”

Evidence that TEPCO has again failed to adequately deal with a problem at the crippled plant was met with anger in Tokyo and in neighbouring countries.

Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said: “Any way you look at it, this is deplorable.”
A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed “shock” that highly radioactive water is continuing to leak at the facility. 

“We hope that the Japanese side can earnestly take effective steps to put an end to the negative impact of the after-effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident,” it added.

In Seoul, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said Japanese officials had been asked to explain the measures that
are being taken to stop the contaminated water escaping into the ocean and impacting fish stocks.

The severity of the ongoing problems at Fukushima will be constantly monitored, an official of the NRA told The Daily Telegraph, and the alert level will be altered if the situation deteriorates further or if additional information about the scale of the problem is received.

The NRA raised the warning level after 300 tons of highly contaminated coolant water seeped from storage tanks and left pools of radioactive water.

On Wednesday evening, a TEPCO spokesman raised the possibility that contaminated water had got into the drainage channel, potentially leaking into the ocean.

It was the first time an incident at the plant had met the INES threshold since the plant was crippled by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The initial disaster was rated a maximum Level Seven on the INES scale, ranking it alongside the Chernobyl accident of 1986.

A spokesman for TEPCO confirmed that 300 tons of water contaminated after being used to cool the four damaged reactors at the site has leaked from a stainless steel storage tank.

TEPCO reported that a pool that has formed around the tank was emitting radiation of 100 millisieverts per hour, but the company said work was under way to pump the remaining water from the damaged tank and mop up the water that had escaped into the environment.

Experts say that anyone spending one hour in proximity to the leaked water would be exposed to radioactivity equivalent to five years’ normal exposure. Radiation sickness would set in after less then 12 hours.
More than 350,000 tons of highly radioactive water are stored in tanks close to the reactors. TEPCO is seeking ways of decontaminating the water but making little progress.

More water has been leaking into the ground around the site, although TEPCO has until recently refused to admit that the radioactive water has been seeping into the sea. In July, the company confirmed that as much as 300 tons of water has escaped into the Pacific every day since the disaster struck 29 months ago.

The Japanese government has ordered the utility to solve the problem immediately, but there is a growing belief that little has been achieved to render the damaged reactors safe and that another earthquake or accident during the decommissioning process could trigger a new catastrophe.