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300 Tons of Contaminated Water Leak From Japanese Nuclear Plant

August 20, 2013 by

Workers raced to place sandbags around the leak at the site to stem the spread of the water, a task made more urgent by a forecast of heavy rain for the Fukushima region later in the day. A spokesman at Tokyo Electric Power, the plant’s operator, acknowledged that much of the contaminated water had seeped into the soil and could eventually reach the ocean, adding to the tons of radioactive fluids that have already leaked into the sea from the troubled plant.

The leaked water contains levels of radioactive cesium and strontium many hundreds of times higher than legal safety limits, Tokyo Electric said. Exposure to either element is known to increase the risk of cancer.

The company said it had not determined the source of the leak.

“We must prevent the contaminated water from dispersing further due to rain and are piling up more sandbags,” said Masayuki Ono, a spokesman for the operator, also known as Tepco. But he also said much of the water has been absorbed into the soil, and workers would need to try to remove some of the soil using shovel cars and other heavy machinery.

Tepco has acknowledged in recent weeks that leaks of radioactive runoff at the site, about 150 miles north of Tokyo, are at crisis levels. The runoff comes from cooling water that workers are pumping into the damaged cores of the site’s three most damaged reactors, as well as from groundwater pouring into the breached basements of those reactors.

Some of that runoff has been seeping into the ocean since the accident at the site in 2011, triggered by a powerful earthquake and a 14-meter tsunami. To reduce the leaks, Tepco has started pumping out some of the contaminated water and storing it in almost 1,000 large tanks it has built on the debris-strewn site.

Tepco hopes to start cleansing the water using an elaborate filtering system and start releasing low-level contaminated water into the ocean. Those plans have been delayed by technical problems and protests from local fishermen.

Desperate for options, Japan’s nuclear regulator has suggested surrounding the plant with a huge underground ice wall to stem any leaks. That plan has its own drawbacks, however, and would require huge amounts of electricity almost indefinitely.

The latest leak comes from one of the site’s 1,000 tanks, about 500 yards inland, Tepco said. Workers discovered puddles of radioactive water near the tank on Monday. Further checks revealed that the 1,000-ton capacity vessel, thought to be nearly full, only contained 700 tons, with the remainder having almost certainly leaked out.

There had been concerns raised among some experts over the durability of the tanks. Mr. Ono said that Tepco had assumed the tanks would last at least five years, but the latest leak comes less than two years after the company started installing the storage vessels at the site to deal with the growing amounts of runoff.

“It is going to be very difficult and dangerous for Tepco to keep on storing all this water,” said Hiroshi Miyano, an expert in nuclear system design at Hosei University in Tokyo. He said, for example, that another strong earthquake or tsunami could destroy the tanks and lead to a huge spill.

At some point, Tepco will have no choice but to start releasing some of the water into the ocean after cleaning it, Dr. Miyano said. The continued mishaps at the site have heightened public scrutiny of Tepco and made it more difficult to build public consensus around any release of water, he said.

“That just makes the problem worse, with no viable solution,” he said.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority described the leak as a Level 1 incident, the lowest level, on a global scale that rates radiological releases. This was the first time that Japan had declared a radiological event since earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, which was rated at Level 7, the highest on that scale and on par with the 1986 accident at Chernobyl.

In a statement, the regulator ordered Tepco to do its utmost to identify the exact source of the leak, to step up radiation monitoring at the site and to remove contaminated soil. Tepco said it would do its best to comply.

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/asia/300-tons-of-contaminated-water-leak-from-japanese-nuclear-plant.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Utility Reform Eluding Japan After Nuclear Plant Disaster

November 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The plant would ensure a stable supply of electricity for the capital in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdowns in March at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But more important, the city government says, it could spur desperately needed change in Japan. By weakening Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, reformers hope to finally break the linchpin of the collusion between business and government that once drove Japan’s rapid postwar rise, but that now keeps it mired in stagnation.

“Now’s our chance,” said Naoki Inose, Tokyo’s vice governor, invoking an ancient proverb about attacking a wild dog only after it has fallen into a river: “On March 11, Tepco became the dog that fell into the river. Only then can you fight against such a formidable foe.”

So formidable a foe, in fact, that just eight months after Japanese leaders vowed the nuclear disaster — like the end of World War II — would lead to a kind of rebirth, the chances for fundamental change are rapidly slipping away.

Already, the reformers have lost a crucial ally: Naoto Kan, who as prime minister had called for an end to nuclear power and major changes to the power industry. He was eased out of office with the help of Japan’s most powerful corporate lobby, a faithful Tepco supporter that, like many members of Japan’s establishment, has benefited from the company’s largess.

And Mr. Kan’s successor, Yoshihiko Noda, whose party came to power promising to build a new Japan, instead joined the old guard to rally around nuclear power, and Tepco.

“In the early months after the accident, I thought there was a real chance for change, but now the move to turn Fukushima into an opportunity for radical reforms is losing steam,” said Hiroshi Okumura, an economist and the author of “Dismantling Tepco.” “There’s a very big risk that Japan’s lost decade, which became the lost 20 years, will now become the lost 30 years.”

It is difficult to overstate the influence of Tepco, which rivals the American defense industry in its domestic reach.

Thanks to a virtual monopoly and a murky electricity pricing system, it has become one of the biggest sources of loosely regulated cash for politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, who have repaid Tepco with unquestioning support and with the type of lax oversight that contributed to the nuclear crisis.

The pockets of insurgency against Tepco are being led by politicians like Mr. Inose, who successfully took on the nation’s road construction monopoly a few years ago; a team of bureaucrats who lost power after an earlier aborted attempt at energy deregulation; and some of Japan’s most innovative businessmen.

Arrayed against them are the interests that have long profited from the virtually unchallenged hold on the market enjoyed by the company and the nation’s nine other utilities. The corporate lobby, the Japan Business Federation or Keidanren, came out clearly against deregulation, leading to a public clash with one of its highest-profile members, Hiroshi Mikitani, an entrepreneur whose 14-year-old company, Rakuten, has grown into Japan’s largest online shopping mall and is rapidly expanding overseas.

Over Twitter, Mr. Mikitani, 46, said the utilities’ “monopoly and the collusion among politicians, bureaucrats, businesses and the news media” were preventing deregulation.

In leaving Keidanren, the business federation, he accused it of furthering Japan’s “Galapagosization” — a neologism signifying Japan’s growing tendency to turn inward, relying on a shrinking home market as it fails to compete globally.

Supporters of the power industry argue that deregulation will only hurt the country, blaming it for causing blackouts in countries like the United States with deregulated markets.

“The revolutionaries feel it’s fun to smash existing things,” said Yosuke Kondo, a lawmaker and a former deputy minister in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the energy sector. “Why do they feel the need to smash something that we can boast to the world about?”

Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=45e189b599d5a6c4cc6f3fde37713dd5

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Mysterious Trades in a Big Block of Tokyo Electric Shares Draw Regulators’ Interest

April 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

TOKYO — Japanese regulators and executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company are asking questions about a seemingly coordinated series of stock purchases two weeks ago that led to an undisclosed buyer or buyers acquiring a large block of the utility, which owns Japan’s dangerously damaged nuclear power plant.

Regulators want to know whether the trades, valued at up to $600 million and placed from Hong Kong during the week of April 3, were structured to circumvent Japanese securities laws, which require the owner of more than 5 percent of a publicly traded company to file disclosure papers identifying the shareholder.

Depending on the prices at which the buy orders were executed, they could add up to nearly 10 percent of Tepco’s shares.

The trading and the questions surrounding it were described by a senior executive of another company in an interview here. The executive insisted on anonymity to protect business and government connections.

Regulators are also making informal queries to determine whether the government of China or any other country might have used its sovereign wealth fund to finance the purchases, although they could have been made by hedge funds, the senior executive said.

“They’re really, really pushing, trying to figure out who it was,” the executive said of the regulators. “There’s somebody out there that holds a whale of a position, and structured the position in such a way that they don’t have to file” a mandatory disclosure.

Hiro Hasegawa, a spokesman at Tokyo Electric, widely known here as Tepco, declined to comment.

The trades were made during a period when the nuclear accident seemed to be threatening the company with financial disaster. Panicked investors were dumping Tepco’s shares, with as many as a fifth of the shares changing hands each day, at prices as low as 292 yen ($3.51) apiece Before the earthquake, shares of Tepco traded steadily at 2,100 yen ($25.25).

Now the worst of the crisis — after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant — seems to have passed, although worries remain about the possibility of powerful aftershocks and another tsunami.

Hydrogen gas explosions have stopped occurring at the plant, a leak of highly radioactive water has been plugged and robots are starting to enter the reactor buildings to assess the potential for long-term repairs.

Government officials are talking about ways to help pay for the cleanup, including a sales tax or a national surcharge on electricity. Tepco’s shares have recovered in the last six trading sessions, closing at 467 yen ($5.61) a share in Tokyo in Monday.

So who was brave enough to buy Tepco’s shares when investors feared its damaged reactors could release a cloud of radiation toward Tokyo at any moment? That is what regulators and Tokyo Electric officials are trying to find out.

Hiroyuki Hara, an official at Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission, said the commission was unable to comment on specific cases or investigations. He said, however, that the commission had stepped up checks of market movements in the turmoil after the March 11 disaster, including any indications of market manipulation or insider trading. He declined to say whether any investigations had been opened.

Kazushi Sato, an official at the foreign currencies section at the Finance Ministry, said that an investigation would be started only if there were grounds to suspect that a foreign investor had pursued ownership totaling over 10 percent of a national security asset without telling Japanese financial authorities and gaining approval. Not doing so would violate Japanese law. He said he was not aware that such an investigation had been opened over Tokyo Electric shares.

An official at the international investment division of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees foreign investment in Japanese utilities, said he was not aware of an investigation into trading of Tokyo Electric shares.

When six bankers in Hong Kong and Tokyo were asked about the purchases, two said that they had heard about them but had no idea who was behind them. The other four said they had heard nothing about the transactions.

Trading records show that investors, fearful of Tepco’s liability from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, dumped hundreds of millions of Tepco’s shares in the week of April 3. Nearly a fifth of the entire company’s shares, worth $1.2 billion, changed hands on April 6. More than a tenth of the company’s shares changed hands each of the other days of the week; trading volume has gradually dwindled since then.

All of the world’s biggest banks now have offices in Hong Kong. So orders coming from Hong Kong may not have been placed on behalf of a company, investment fund or individual located there. The money could be coming from the banks’ clients all over the world, including in Japan itself.

Japanese officials are quick to look for Chinese involvement in commercial matters, particularly after China imposed a two-month embargo last autumn on shipments of crucial rare earth minerals to Japan during a territorial dispute over islands in the East China Sea.

But bankers said that the China Investment Corporation, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, seemed like an unlikely buyer of a large stake. China Investment has tended to avoid controversial acquisitions. The fund declined to comment on Monday.

A possible buyer might be a Japanese financial institution that did not believe Japan would allow such a prominent business to collapse.

Business leaders have been hostile to conjecture about an outright nationalization of Tokyo Electric, which has long been one of the bluest of Japan’s blue-chip companies and plays a central role in business groups. Nationalization seemed like a possibility two weeks ago, but has faded from the political dialogue since then.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=222fa7cbc91042b363057f5af771c9ba

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