Operator says new radioactive leak at Japan’s Fukushima

An estimated 300 tonnes of radioactive water is believed to have leaked from a tank at Japan's crippled nuclear plant, the operator said today as it battled the latest toxic water threat.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said the leak was believed to be continuing today at Fukushima and it had not yet pinpointed the source of it.

TEPCO said puddles with extremely high radiation levels have been found near the water tanks at the plant.

The radiation level was about 100 millisieverts per hour, it said.

"This means you are exposed to the level of radiation in an hour that a nuclear plant worker is allowed to be exposed to in five years," a TEPCO official told reporters.

The company later said it had identified which tank was leaking but had yet to find the spot from where it was leaking.

"We have instructed TEPCO to find the source of contaminated water...and to seal the leakage point," an official from the Nuclear Regulation Authority told AFP.

Decontamination workers remove radiated soil and leaves from a forest in Kawauchi village, Fukushima prefecture, on July 5, 2013. The most ambitious radiation clean-up ever attempted has proved costly, complex and time-consuming since the Japanese government began it more than two years in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. It may also fail. Doubts are mounting that the effort to decontaminate hotspots in an area the size of Connecticut will succeed in its ultimate aim - luring more than 100,000 nuclear evacuees back home.

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"We have also instructed them to retrieve contaminated soil to avoid a further expansion of toxic water, and to strengthen monitoring of the surrounding environment."

There were no significant changes in radiation levels outside the plant, he added.

TEPCO admitted it was possible the toxic water could contaminate groundwater and flow into the Pacific Ocean "in the longer term," but said it was working to avoid such a situation.

"We are transferring the contaminated water from a tank with a leakage problem to unbroken tanks, and retrieving leaked water and soil around it," the TEPCO official said.

"We are also beefing up existing earth-fill dams around tanks," he said, as the region braces for heavy rain later today.

So far four tonnes of the spilled water had been retrieved since yesterday evening when TEPCO started the recovery operation, the company said.

TEPCO has faced a growing catalogue of incidents at the plant including several leaks of radioactive water, more than two years after the worst nuclear disaster in a generation triggered by a huge quake and tsunami in March 2011.

The company - which faces huge clean-up and compensation costs - has struggled with a massive amount of radioactive water accumulating as a result of continuing water injections to cool reactors.

The embattled utility in July admitted for the first time that radioactive groundwater had been leaking outside the plant. This month it started pumping it out to reduce leakage into the Pacific.

The problems have led the Japanese government and its nuclear regulator to say they would get more directly involved in the cleanup at Fukushima.

While no one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of the meltdowns of Fukushima's reactors, large areas around the plant had to be evacuated.

Tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to their homes. - AFP, August 20, 2013.