Japanese government to step-up decontamination efforts at crippled Fukushima plant

Japan's Environment Ministry said Monday that it plans to carry out new decontamination work at the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture. Government officials made the announcement following a spike in radiation levels at a number of locations in the vicinity of the crisis-hit Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan's northeast. The rise in radiation levels has caused local officials and residents to urge the government to do more to contain the crisis, which has escalated of late following radioactive water leaking from a storage tank and into the Pacific Ocean. The ministry said it plans to decontaminate sites where the levels of radiation have exceeded those during the first clean-up mission and revisit sites where initial decontamination processes were incomplete or deemed insufficient. Wooded areas around the plant, in which radiation is believed to have been carried by rain and on leaves, will be decontaminated, the ministry said, adding that these areas are of significant importance as they are located just meters from residential areas. As the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) struggles to control the earthquake and tsunami-triggered crisis, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said Monday that it was intolerable to allow radioactive water to flow freely from the plant and into the Pacific Ocean. "It's extremely regrettable and the government will do all it can to resolve the problem as soon as possible," Japan's top government spokesperson told a news conference Monday. He added that TEPCO had failed to properly maintain the tank and this was the cause of around 300 tons of highly radioactive water leaking from the stricken site. Japanese nuclear energy watchdog subsequently raised the incident level from one to three on the international scale that measures the severity of nuclear accidents, marking the highest crisis level since the reactors melted down in March 2011. Suga said the government must now more proactively tackle the crisis and indicated that more funding would be made available as the disaster continues to escalate. Global nuclear regulators and independent watchdogs are concerned that massive amounts of water used to cool the reactor cores, which are now being stored on site, may be too much for the tanks'capacities. Around 1,000 tanks have been built to contain the highly radioactive water, but the tanks are at 85 percent of their capacity, with 400 tons of extra water being added daily.