The ALPS treated water discharge is a turning point in the decommissioning of the power station and for the reconstruction in Fukushima. Find out more here Sponsored by the Japan Reconstruction Agency
At the site of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, more than 1000 storage tanks hold purified water that has been put through the Advanced Liquid Processing System to remove radioactive contaminants. That’s over 1.3 million cubic metres of water, enough to fill the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building.
In the afternoon of 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake rocked the east coast of Japan, the most powerful ever recorded in the country. It caused huge damage in the Tōhoku region in the north of Honshu Island.The earthquake also unleashed a tsunami that struck the coastal area of Tōhoku that same day. Over 19,000 people died in this double disaster although no one was killed by radiation.
However, there is a lingering task at Fukushima. The nuclear material inside the affected reactors needs to be cooled with a constant flow of water and this becomes contaminated with radioactive substances or “nuclides”. The problem is made worse by rain and groundwater flowing into the buildings. The idea is conceptually similar to a household water filter, but on a huge scale. The system pumps the contaminated water through a series of filters. These contain adsorbent materials that bind to the radionuclides. Because there are so many different nuclides, ranging from antimony to zinc, the water goes through multiple filters with different adsorbent properties.
A normal hydrogen atom has a single proton in its central nucleus, but tritium also has two neutrons. These neutrons make the nucleus unstable and therefore radioactive. The problem is that tritium is chemically identical to hydrogen and very difficult to remove from hydrogen-bearing compounds such as water. Tritium exists naturally in sea water and even in the human body, albeit at low concentrations. These low concentrations are safe because tritium does not accumulate in the body.
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