Tokyo Electric Power Co. has fought an eight-month battle to decontaminate the massive amounts of radioactive water in the reactor basements of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, and the struggle is far from over.
Though it continues to process contaminated water currently flooding the basements of the reactor and turbine buildings for recycling to cool the reactors, the utility has yet to come up with a way to drain all the water from the buildings. With the trouble unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, the threat of further soil, groundwater and sea contamination near the power plant continues.
Tepco originally planned to process 200,000 tons of contaminated water and remove it all by the end of this year, but some 200 to 500 tons of groundwater flows into the buildings every day, rendering this option impossible.