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August 21st, 2013 
Peter Nolan
“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.
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