Water cooling Japan plant now a problem

TOKYO -- At the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, nothing is more problematic than the contaminated water that covers the basement floors, leaks into the environment and endangers any worker who goes near it.

After dousing its reactors for 21/2 months in jury-rigged cooling efforts after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. must deal with the side effects of that strategy by removing at least 26 million gallons of water -- enough to fill the first five floors of the Empire State Building.

But engineers planning that unprecedented cleanup job face questions about where they will put the water and how effectively they can filter its radioactive particles.

Workers must inject the reactor cores with water to keep them cool. But that step guarantees that water will leak through the damaged plant and into the basement-level turbine rooms.

The resulting radioactive water makes repair work all the harder. That means workers, still struggling to fix the usual recirculation system, must continue to "feed and bleed" the reactors from above. And that means water levels continue to rise down below.

"They're just perpetuating the problem and making a bigger and bigger mess," said Lake Barrett, a nuclear engineer who directed the cleanup of the hobbled Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

A potential turning point may come in about two weeks, when Tepco plans to begin a treatment process in which water will be sucked from the basement rooms and fed into a tank, then treated with chemicals that eliminate radioactivity.

The process will create a byproduct of radioactive sludge, which is generally mixed with bitumen, poured into drums, sealed and buried. The water can be cycled back into reactors or discarded into the ocean.