Anyone who has been following the ongoing nightmare of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will know that over the past months there have been a slew of news articles documenting the contamination of the land and water beneath the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant No. 1 (FNPP#1), also referred to as “Dai-ichi,” meaning “no. 1.” The radioactive contamination beneath the FNPP#1 is both highly radioactive and being found at great depths.
Situated on the edge of the ocean, FNPP#1 is built on soft and spongy “fill” soil and is nearly the opposite of Chernobyl where that power plant’s foundation was rock solid.
We can clearly detect a pattern here: the corium globs (melted fuel) from the three melted down reactors (numbers 1, 2, 3) are in unknown locations. That melted fuel could either be in the bottom of the reactor buildings where it is constantly being cooled by the coolant water that Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is pumping onto it, or melted through the bottom of the buildings and undergoing a China Syndrome phenomenon. Either way not only is coolant water leaking out of the buildings before it is recycled into safer storage tanks, but also groundwater is seeping up into those buildings, becoming contaminated, then pouring out again. The contaminated water is traveling both into the ground water and out to sea.
Just recently it has been reported that Tepco is planning to dump all of the stored water on site, as they are running out of space! The filtration system is imperfect and does not remove all radionuclides reliably, and crucially does not remove any tritium, which would be the main source of radiation to be dumped into the ocean.
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An Underground Plume Of Doom?
However, the groundwater contamination issue is something few people are talking about. A colleague of mine who is an astute researcher, Professor Uranium, and I, were discussing the possibility of the Tokyo drinking water supply eventually becoming contaminated by this process.
“I think the plume of radiation in the aquifer is relatively slow moving. But my understanding is that the aquifer under Daiichi eventually connects up to other aquifers in Japan, including the one that sources Tokyo. The fuel is underground. The water supply is going to be contaminated in the long run.”
Back in 2012 one of the more honest and outspoken nuclear engineers in Japan at the time, Masashi Goto, was quoted as saying he worried the contamination from the FNPP#1 could potentially reach “public water supplies” (4).
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