VIENNA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th September, 2019) Japan has not yet made any final decision on whether to release the tritium-tainted wastewater that is accumulating at the crippled Fukushima No 1 power plant into the Pacific Ocean and and is still mulling over various options, including long-term storage, an official from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) told Sputnik.
Earlier in September, then-Japanese Environment Minister Yoshiaki Harada said that TEPCO, an operator of the power plant, had no choice but to empty a massive amount of contaminated wastewater into the ocean. The wastewater, which is stored in tanks at the plant's premises, was purified by the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), but Japan has no technology to clear the water from tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
"We are now discussing five options [on how to handle tainted water] and long-time storage ... We did not decide how to treat this water," Tatsuya Shinkawa, the director general for nuclear accident disaster response at the METI, said on the sidelines of the annual International Atomic Energy Agency's General Conference in Vienna.
More than a million tonnes of wastewater is currently stored in tanks at the Fukushima site, but the facility is reportedly running out of available space and expects to exhaust its capacity by summer 2022.
�The accident at the Fukushima plant in March 2011 was triggered by a 46-feet tsunami that hit Japan following a 9.0-magnitude offshore earthquake. The meltdown at three out of the four units and hydrogen-air explosions, which were provoked by a cooling systems failure, led to the leakage of radioactive materials and the shutdown of the plant.
