"Nearly 700,000 tons of radioactive water stored at Fukushima plant"
September 5, 2015 As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, 700,000 tons of highly contaminated radioactive water has accumulated in temporary storage tanks at the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The figure grows by several hundred tons per day.
This means an additional 1,000-ton, 30-foot tall storage tank must be added every few days. More than a thousand such tanks now exist at the site.
700,000 tons of contaminated water is equal to more than 188 million U.S. gallons.
As the article reports, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) claims that most of the stored wastewater has already been processed by its ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System), as of May 2015.
However, the ALPS had suffered numerous breakdowns, and even leaks into the environment, over the past several years. Also, ALPS only filters out 60-some of the radioactive substances in the wastewater. There are a couple hundred radioactive substances contaminating the water.
One of the hazardous radioactive substances that cannot be filtered out is tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. Tepco wants to simply dump the massive amount of tritium into the Pacific, but Japanese fishermen have resisted the plan for years.
Another unresolved question is where the 60-odd radioactive substances filtered out of the wastewater by ALPS will be stored or dumped.