Three hundred tons of water polluted by radioactive materials burst through a storage vessel at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan on Tuesday.
The contaminated fluids rushed outside the facility, soaking into the ground as workers scrambled to stop the water from flowing into the Pacific Ocean by stacking sandbags around the leak. Weather forecasts of heavy rain made it all the more imperative for cleanup crews to ebb the flow of fluid.
The water contained a high amount of cancer-causing radioactive cesium and strontium that ran way above state safety levels, the New York Times reported.
Plant workers found puddles of contaminated water beneath the tank on Monday. The following morning, they investigated further to find that the tank-which can contain 1,000 tons of liquid-only held 700 tons. The rest had leaked out.
Tokyo Electric reported that it has not yet found the reason behind the leak.
"We must prevent the contaminated water from dispersing further due to rain and are piling up more sandbags," Masayuki Ono, a spokesperson for the plant's operator, Tepco, said.
Ono also stated that a fair amount of the water managed to seep into the soil outside, and that crews would have to take away some of that contaminated ground by shoveling it out.
According to the New York Times, this isn't the first time that the plant has seen a leak that caused contamination-Tepco said that in the past few weeks, radioactive runoff leaks have been at "crisis levels." Tons of poisonous fluids have streamed into the ocean from the site of the plant.
Tepco has begun pumping some of the sullied fluid and putting it into nearly 1,000 tanks that can store a few tons of water, in hopes that soon, slightly contaminated water can be let out into the ocean. But local fishermen have slowed those plans to almost a halt, as they have protested the health risks associated with such dumping.
"It is going to be very difficult and dangerous for Tepco to keep storing all this water," Hiroshi Miyano, nuclear system design expert at Hosei University, told the New York Times. He said another spill could happen at any moment, especially if triggered by a natural disaster such as an earthquake.
In 2011, the plant experienced a catastrophic spill brought on by an earthquake and 14-meter tsunami.
