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Water Leak at Japan Nuclear Plant

The Associated Press, Mon 24 Jul 2000

Officials who shut down a nuclear reactor to check an oil leak at a northeastern Japan power plant discovered that a small amount of radioactive water had leaked out, the plant's operator said Monday. Photo shows security guards of Japan's private nuclear fuel company, JCO Tokaimura after a uranium reaction sent radiation levels soaring at the plant in 1999. (Photo: AFP) TOKYO (AP)  Officials who shut down a nuclear reactor to check an oil leak at a northeastern Japan power plant discovered that a small amount of radioactive water had leaked out, the plant's operator said Monday.

The leak at the Fukushima No. 1 plant injured no one and did not escape from the facility, said Yoshimi Hitosugi, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., Japan's largest power company. It came four days after an earthquake led to the shutdown of another reactor at the same plant.

The six-reactor plant is located in Okuma, a town of 10,900 on the Pacific coast in Fukushima state, 150 miles northeast of Tokyo.

Hitosugi said plant workers found 40 gallons of radioactive water that had leaked near the plant's No. 2 reactor late Sunday. The discovery came an hour after the reactor was manually shut down because of an oil leak.

``No one was injured and nothing radioactive leaked outside the plant,'' Hitosugi said.

Plant officials later determined the radioactive water leaked from a joint in a pipe linked to the hydraulic pressure system for controlling rods, utility official Kazuyoshi Takahara said.

Officials were still investigating whether the fissure that caused the oil leak resulted from a recent strong earthquake in the Pacific, Takahara said.

On Friday, the No. 6 reactor at the Fukushima nuclear plant was shut down after a leak of waste gas was detected in a tank where steam used to power the turbines was turned back into water.

No leak of radioactive material was reported at the No. 6 reactor. But it was shut down as a cautionary measure after a 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of eastern Japan.

Japan has an aggressive nuclear power program: The resource-poor nation depends on nuclear energy for a third of its electricity.

Public faith was shaken, however, by the nation's worst nuclear accident Sept. 30 at a fuel-processing plant in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo, which took the lives of two workers and seriously injured a third. Dozens of people are believed to have been exposed to less harmful radiation in that accident, which set off an uncontrolled atomic reaction.

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-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), July 25, 2000