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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Japan nuclear regulator alarmed at Fukushima contamination reports

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Japan's nuclear regulator expressed growing alarm on Wednesday at increased contamination beside the seafront of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station and urged the plant's operators to take protective measures.

Fukushima's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has acknowledged problems are mounting at the plant north of Tokyo, the site of the world's worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

On Tuesday, the company said radiation levels in groundwater had soared, suggesting highly toxic materials from the plant were getting closer to the Pacific more than two years after three meltdowns triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami.

Shunichi Tanaka, head of the new Nuclear Regulation Authority, told reporters he believed contamination of the sea had been continuing since the March 2011 catastrophe.

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