Plutonium Found around Japan

According to reporters from Tokyo, highly contaminated water escaping from a damaged reaction could soon leak onto the ocean. The warning came as Japanese Nuclear Regulators made the statement on Japanese television on Monday. According to NPR, however, the IAEA engineers have worked with Japanese workers in order to create a trench to capture the dangerous water. Yet, it is still unknown if this strategy will work.

The discovery of contaminated water poses a further setback to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis as workers find themselves in increasingly hazardous conditions. In another new finding, plutonium was detected in soil at five locations at the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the complex, said. The company asserted that the plutonium, found in samples taken a week ago, posed no threat to public health and that only two samples appeared to have plutonium that came from the plant. Tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, which ended in 1980, left trace amounts of plutonium around the world.

The source of the plutonium found at the plant was unclear. All three kinds of nuclear fuel at the complex could leak plutonium. Reactor No. 3 is fueled partly by mixed oxide fuel, which is made from plutonium and uranium. Most reactors’ fuel is uranium. However, plutonium is a regular byproduct of a reactor splitting uranium atoms in two. In a kind of nuclear alchemy, some of the speeding subatomic particles of the fission process turn uranium into plutonium.

Therefore, reactor fuel rods that undergo atomic fission are riddled with plutonium. Thus, any of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi could leak plutonium as spent fuel rods in cooling pools atop the reactor buildings.
The nuclear safety agency also reported that radioactive iodine 131 was detected Sunday at a concentration 1,150 times the maximum allowable level in a seawater sample taken about a mile north of the drainage outlets of reactor units 1 through 4. It also said that the amount of cesium 137 found in water about 1,000 feet from plant was 20 times the normal level, roughly equal to readings taken a week ago.

The disclosure about the escaping contaminated water came as workers pressed their efforts to remove highly radioactive water from inside buildings at the plant. The high levels of radioactivity have made it harder for them to get inside the reactor buildings and control rooms to get equipment working again, slowing the effort to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant has been leaking radiation since a magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami struck northeastern Japan’s coast on March 11. The tsunami knocked out power to the plant’s system that cools the nuclear fuel rods.

(아주경제 앤드류 이 기자)

Park Sae-jin swatchsjp@ajunews.com