Japan Dumps Radioactive Water in Sea as Cesium Is Found in Fish

April 05, 2011, 12:59 PM EDT

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By Tsuyoshi Inajima and Kari Lundgren

(For more on the Japanese earthquake, see EXT3 .)

April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Tokyo Electric Power Co. is pumping millions of gallons of radioactive water into the sea from its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant as contamination exceeding health guidelines was detected in fish for the first time.

Cesium was found in fish caught north of Tokyo yesterday as the utility prepared to discharge another 10,000 tons (2.6 million gallons) of water from the plant to make room for storing more highly radioactive fluids. Dumping began April 3 because radioactive water on site is hindering repair of cooling pumps.

“Clearly, they haven’t got the site under control,” said Richard Wakeford, a visiting professor of epidemiology at the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute in England. “They’ve got to make difficult decisions and one of those is you get rid of the mildly radioactive liquid to make way for the really contaminated liquid.”

Exposure to Cesium-137 increases the risk of cancer, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Japan has struggled to keep the radioactive fuel at the Fukushima reactors cool after equipment was damaged by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Tokyo Electric plunged the daily limit of 80 yen, or 18 percent, to close at 362 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange yesterday, the lowest since its listing in August 1951. The stock has dropped 83 percent since the day before the magnitude- 9 earthquake.

Risk Low

Another 1,500 tons of water from pits outside two reactors will be drained over five days, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Risk to people from the deliberate discharge at the Fukushima plant is low, according to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

The potential additional radiation dose to a person eating seaweed or seafood caught near the Fukushima plant every day for a year would be 0.6 millisievert, the agency said in a statement. That compares to 0.85 millisievert from a year of exposure to granite that comprises the U.S. Capitol, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Fish caught off the coast of Ibaraki prefecture, south of Fukushima, had 526 becquerel per kilogram of cesium, more than the health ministry’s standard of 500 becquerel, according to the local government.

With a radioactive half-life of 30 years, cesium can build up in the meat of marine predators as they eat smaller animals, said Karen Gaines, chairwoman of the biology department at the University of Eastern Illinois in Charleston.

Fishing Damage

The Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co- operative Associations has written to Tokyo Electric asking it to stop dumping radioactive water into the sea because it may damage their fishing ground forever.

“If they’re going to restart fisheries and make people feel comfortable, they’ll need real-time monitoring of the catch,” said Gaines, who studies radioactive cesium in animals at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which made plutonium for U.S. nuclear weapons.

Tokyo Electric has reduced a leak of highly contaminated water from a pit near the No. 2 reactor by injecting a firming agent. The company will continue injecting the agent, sodium silicate, said Seiji Suzuki, a spokesman.

Credit Risk

The cost of insuring Tokyo Electric’s debt jumped 27 basis points to 391 basis points, according to CMA prices for credit- default swaps. The contracts, which rise as perceptions of credit quality deteriorate, reached a record 447 basis points March 31.

Tokyo Electric is paying 20 million yen ($237,276) to each of 10 local governments affected by the disaster, Vice President Takashi Fujimoto said at a news conference. The utility may ask government assistance to pay compensation, Fujimoto said.

To handle the plant’s radioactive material, Japan has asked Russia for a waste-treatment plant housed on a barge, Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom Corp., said in Moscow.

There are about 60,000 tons of contaminated water in basements and trenches outside reactors No. 1, 2 and 3, said Takeo Iwamoto, a company spokesman. Tokyo Electric plans to pump half of that to a waste-treatment facility and the rest to tanks and floating storage vessels, he said.

--With assistance from Yee Kai Pin in Singapore, Susan Li in Hong Kong, Jonathan Tirone in Vienna, Ilya Khrennikov in Moscow, Michael Shanahan and Alex Devine in London and Akiko Nishimae and Jim Polson in New York. Editors: Tina Davis, Jessica Resnick-Ault
To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Kari Lundgren in London at klundgren2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net