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http://www.reuters.com)
Another tank at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has been found to be leaking contaminated water.
This is the second such leak to occur in two months. Last month, amid growing international concern, Japan's government said it would fund efforts to improve management of the radioactive water at the site.
Yoshihide Suga, Japan's top government spokesman, said that he thought the situation was under control, but these latest leaks show that the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (Tepco) efforts to improve its containment of contaminated water has been insufficient.
Tepco said that the leaked water contained 200,000 becquerels of beta-emitting radioactive isotopes per liter. Over as much as 12 hours, about 113 gallons (430 liters) of contaminated water spilled over the brim of a tilted tank set on uneven ground, Masayuki Ono, a spokesman for Tepco, told reporters.
The company is filling the containment tanks to the top, as it struggles to find storage space for all the radioactive water.
Tepco admitted only this past summer that contaminated water from the Fukushima plant was leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Ono said that the recently found water leak has likely flowed into a trench leading to the Pacific Ocean.
Officials claim that radiation leaks are mostly confined to the harbor around the plant and that it does not represent an environmental threat, as the radiation will be diluted by the sea. Of course, Tepco and the Japanese government have been downplaying this disaster since it began, so how much can we really trust such claims?
