"TEPCO racing against time to process 280,000 tons of tainted water at Fukushima plant"
January 19, 2015 As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, serious problems persist with highly radioactively contaminated water at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Despite TEPCO's self-imposed promise to Japanese Prime Minister Abe in late 2013, that the highly contaminated water would have 60+ radionuclides filtered out by March 2015, some 280,000 tons (or 75 million gallons) of highly contaminated water remain. The contaminated water is stored in many hundreds of hastily and shoddily built, massive on-site storage tanks. Workers near the storage tanks are exposed to gamma radiation doses emanating out from the contained water. (Note, however, that the reported 1 milliSievert, or 100 millirem, worker exposure figure is not given a unit time. Is that per hour? Per day? Per year?)
The problem is that the ALPS (French Areva supplied, so-called Advanced Liquid Processing System) have suffered repeated problems, and even leaks, for many months and even years. For this reason, TEPCO has decided to leapfrog the main ALPS, and focus on strontium-removal filtration for the time being. Strontium is a very hazardous bone-seeker.
Supposedly, once the ALPS finally works, some 60+ radionuclides will be removed from the highly contaminated water. However, ALPS will not remove tritium, so TEPCO's plan is to simply release those many tens of millions of gallons of tritiated water directly into the ocean.
The article does not report how the very highly radioactive filters from the ALPS system will be stored or disposed of, themselves.
The article also reports that TEPCO still plans to freeze the ground across the site by March, in a bid to divert groundwater flow away from radioactively contaminated areas.