The head of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant said Wednesday night that it was a relief to see Tokyo win the bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics as yet another leap in groundwater radiation was disclosed at the site.

"Honestly, I felt relieved," said Akira Ono, current chief of the crippled power plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. "I never imagined that the contaminated water issue would actually affect the bid," he said at the news conference in Fukushima.

Officials from Tepco, as the company is known, said tritium in a groundwater sample from a monitoring well near the suspect tank that lost 300 tons of tainted water last month in a level 3 incident was exhibiting 64,000 becquerels per liter of radioactivity.