Japan Struggling to Store Radioactive Waste

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2012/10/2012102510561941251.html

Yuichi Okamura, Leading Nuclear worker says space is running out for contaminated water cooling the Fukushima plants.  Japan's crippled nuclear power plant is struggling to find space to store tens of thousands of tonnes of highly contaminated water used to cool the broken reactors, the manager of the water treatment team has said.  About 200,000 tonnes of radioactive water, enough to fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools, are being stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks built around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.  Operator Tokyo Electric Power Company has already chopped down trees to make room for more tanks and predicts the volume of water will be more than triple within three years.

"It's a time-pressing issue because the storage of contaminated water has its limits, there is only limited storage space" the water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told the AP news agency in an exclusive interview this week.
Dumping massive amounts of water into the melting reactors was the only way to avoid an even bigger catastrophe…… Without water, the spent fuel is likely to have overheated and melted, sending radioactive smoke for miles and affecting possibly millions of people.
The measures to keep the plant under control itself created another major problem for the utility: What to do with all that radioactive water that leaked out of the damaged reactors and collected in the basements of reactor buildings and nearby facilities……
Masashi Goto, nuclear engineer and college lecturer, said the contaminated water build-up posed a big, long-term health and environmental threat.  He worried that the radioactive water in the basements may already be getting into the underground water system, where it could reach far beyond the plant via underground water channels, possibly in the ocean or public water supplies.  "There are pools of some 10,000 or 20,000 tonnes of contaminated water in each plant, and there are many of these, and to bring all these to one place would mean you would have to treat hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated water which is mind-blowing in itself," Goto said.  "It's an outrageous amount, truly outrageous" Goto added.  The plant also would have to deal with contaminated water until all the melted fuel and other debris is removed from the reactor, a process that will easily take more than a decade.