Filtering of Tainted Water Begins at Japanese Plant

The filtering equipment, hastily cobbled together by several foreign and Japanese companies, is urgently needed because the storage facilities at the power plant are flooded with tens of thousands of tons of radioactive water and are expected to overflow as soon as next week if nothing is done.

If that occurs, Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, would be forced to dump thousands of tons of even more tainted water into the ocean, and would probably bring down even more criticism on the embattled company and the government, which has been attacked for its handling of the crisis.

Hoping to avoid releasing any more contaminated water, Tepco in late April set out an ambitious nine-month road map for stabilizing conditions at its nuclear reactors. The plan includes setting up a sprawling water treatment plant that is expected to cost about $663 million. Built under the supervision of Toshiba and Hitachi, the filtration system is meant to sift out oil, and then cesium and other radioactive elements, before desalinating the remaining water.

The system is expected to process about 1,200 tons of water a day, which will be stored in tanks, some of which are being brought to the compound. Some of the filtered water will be reused to cool the reactors, reducing the need for fresh supplies. Tepco plans to filter water for about a year, said Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman.

Tepco originally planned to begin operating the filtration system in July, but it sped up construction because contaminated water had been produced faster than expected at the nuclear plant. A leaky valve halted testing of the system on Thursday, and there were several more delays on Friday, before it finally got running. Tepco acknowledged that the system could falter again and might have to be shut down for repairs.

While the filtration system was being built, Tepco reduced the amount of water it was pouring into the plant’s stricken reactors to avoid filling up its storage facilities.

The beginning of the rainy season this month has complicated efforts to slow the creation of toxic water.

“It is something like a chemical plant constructed in a rush, so we have to go by trial and error,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, referring to the repeated problems that have plagued the project. “We have had to do this in a hurry, so conditions have been very severe.”

In all, about 500 tons of water is newly contaminated at the plant each day, adding to the 105,000 tons of highly radioactive water that is already stored on the site, mostly in the trenches and basements of the turbine and reactor buildings. Many of these areas are perilously near full to the brim. In the trenches at the No. 3 reactor, for example, there was just seven inches to spare on Friday.

Critics contend that while the filtration system will delay the runoff of radioactive water for a while, Tepco will continue to face water disposal problems because it may take years to fully cool the reactors at the plant.

“It’s just a matter of time before it overflows,” said Satoshi Sato, a nuclear engineer who formerly worked for General Electric at the reactors in Fukushima. “It’s an endless game.”

The water stored at the plant is contaminated with cesium 134, cesium 137 and iodine 131 with a total radioactivity estimated at 720,000 terabecquerels, more than the amount of radioactive material that has been spewed into the air at the plant so far.

The new filtration system still faces many hurdles. The companies operating it, including Areva from France and Kurion from the United States, have little experience working with seawater. And Tepco must still dispose of the radioactive material that is being sifted out of the wastewater; it is mixed with a chemical agent to create a toxic sludge.

During the summer, Tepco will deliver 370 tanks to the Daiichi plant to store an extra 40,400 tons of radioactive water. A megafloat that can store yet more water is moored near the plant.

The contaminated water has been an unavoidable side effect of Tepco’s “feed and bleed” strategy for dealing with the four destroyed reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. To cool them for eventual dismantling, the company is pouring huge volumes of freshwater and seawater directly onto the highly radioactive reactors, which contaminates the water, creating an environmental headache.

The devilish consequences of the company’s efforts became clear in April, when rivers of contaminated water seeped through cracks in drainage pits and flowed directly into the Pacific Ocean. While that leak was plugged, a lack of storage for contaminated water soon forced Tepco to deliberately release an additional 11,500 tons into the sea.

The dumping led to an international outcry. In waters near the plant, a variety of fish and seaweed were found with higher than normal levels of radioactivity, prompting a ban on the sale of marine products harvested from parts of Japan’s Pacific coast.

Several workers at the plant have suffered burns on their feet and ankles after stepping in highly radioactive water. Reducing the amount of water in and around the power plant will make it easier for workers to undertake other repairs.

Yasuko Kamiizumi and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

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Central China Hit by Drought, as Reservoirs Become ‘Dead Water’

BEIJING — A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporarily unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze to a near-record low. For the second time since the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, began operating, officials have had to make emergency water discharges from it to help ease the drought.

As of Sunday, 4 medium-size reservoirs and 1,388 small reservoirs in Hubei had dropped below the allowable discharge levels for irrigation, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the director of the reservoir management office for the Hubei Provincial Water Resources Department. One-fourth of all small reservoirs had what officials called “dead water” remaining, which could be pumped for use only in an emergency.

The drought adds to concerns over the effect that a gargantuan water-diversion project will have on the central provinces of China. The project, called the South-North Water Diversion, is supposed to move water from the Yangtze and its tributaries north to Beijing along a canal, and to Tianjin along an eastern route.

Both routes are supposed to be fully operational within the next couple of years. Criticism of the project has become widespread, and many people along the Yangtze and in the south say precious water resources should not be sent north, where there has been a chronic water shortage.

The water on the middle route is supposed to flow from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Hubei. The water level at the reservoir was measured at 443 feet on Saturday, about 13 feet below the level at which the water is considered dead, Xinhua reported.

Du Yun, a geography scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, said in an earlier interview that the central government had not done enough studies to assess the impact of the diversion project, especially when compared with all the research that was done before the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

“For that project, the preliminary discussion and studies phase was decades long,” he said. “There was the participation of institutions and experts from across China. Compared to that, this water diversion project did not do as comprehensive a preliminary study as the Three Gorges project did.”

As of Saturday, the drought had left 315,000 people and 97,300 head of livestock in Hubei short of drinking water, and more than two million acres of farmland had been affected, Xinhua reported. In neighboring Henan Province, the drought had affected at least 320,000 people.

Officials discharged 400 million cubic meters of water from the Three Gorges Dam from May 7 to May 11, according to Wang Hai, a spokesman for the dam’s construction and operation management bureau, Xinhua reported on Thursday.

This discharge is aimed at fighting the current drought and raising levels of the Yangtze to aid shipping. People in the city of Yichang, where the dam stands, have been hit especially hard. They say they have had to buy water rather than relying on water from their land.

The water levels in the section of the Yangtze between Yichang and Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province were about 8 to 18 feet lower than average, Xinhua reported, citing a statement by the Hubei provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters.

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A Delicacy on Chinatown Plates, but a Killer in Water

That tenant, Yong Hao Wu, sold fish until October for his Howei Trading Company out of this shop on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park. Mr. Wu is now out of business and under arrest because the authorities have accused him of illegally importing thousands of live snakehead fish.

In China, the snakehead is a sweet, meaty staple harvested in farms, and when boiled into soup, it is reputed to possess remarkable healing properties. But once outside of its natural river habitats in China, Korea and Russia, it is a rapidly reproducing predator with such a voracious appetite it can wipe out entire schools of fish and destroy an ecosystem.

That the snakehead has been illegal to import into the United States since 2002 when it was found in a pond in Maryland has not diminished its demand — and perhaps has only fueled it. The fish, which has also been illegal to possess in New York State, has been sold in other markets like Boston and is also available through the Internet, officials with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service said.

On Thursday, the authorities caught one of the fishmongers.

Officials arrested Mr. Wu, 43, after an investigation that followed the seizure of 353 live snakeheads on the eve of the 2010 Chinese New Year, at Kennedy International Airport. Surveillance cameras led them to Howei Trading company in Sunset Park, where officials found a tank filled with 82 more snakeheads.

Mr. Wu was arraigned on Thursday night, charged on felony commercialization of wildlife and importing fish dangerous to indigenous fish populations. If convicted, he faces up to four years in prison.

Mr. Wu was released on his own recognizance, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney said, and his next court date is May 13.

Mr. Wu’s lawyer, Melody Glover, did not return messages.

The authorities said Mr. Wu had declared 3,889 imports as “Chinese black sleeper fish,” but he later admitted that they were, in fact, snakeheads. If the freshwater fish escapes its tanks, or is intentionally released, it can slither to water on land for three days. It has been found in rivers and lakes across the country.

But while the authorities and Chinese residents say there is an underground market for live snakeheads, a quest on Friday to find the fish in Brooklyn was fruitless and infused with a whiff of mystery.

“The flavor is absolutely the best,” insisted a 60-year-old man who gave his name as Zhu. He was traveling on a private bus from the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, to Sunset Park. “I’ve never tried it in the U.S., but it’s common and abundant in China. I’ve made it.”

The snakehead was the talk of Chinatown since all the Chinese-language newspapers had articles about Mr. Wu’s arrest, and even featured photos of the fish’s razor-sharp teeth.

Many shoppers and store owners nodded that they knew all about the snakehead, but did not want to talk about it. Some said they had not seen it in Chinatown for a long time, years even.

As skittish as people were in talking about the fish, they would speak even less about Mr. Wu.

Records show that he had most likely lived in New York since 1987, and had filed for bankruptcy in 1997. He had worked in food- and fish-related businesses in the New York area. His address listed by the authorities was a housing project in Coney Island.

His former commercial landlord, Mui Tang, 60, said she kicked him out last October because he did not pay rent. The shop is now a pharmacy that has not yet opened.

Some well-meaning residents suggested several restaurants that might be known to sell the banned fish. The trail led to one restaurant on Eighth Avenue that had tanks inside the front window. When asked about the fish, which goes by various names within the Chinese dialects, the waitress nodded that they had it.

A soup made from the fish, which was not listed on the menu, would have cost $36, she said.

She took a net and snared a slippery creature, flopping in a pail, and said a final decision had to be made within minutes or it would die. This was not a snakehead, as Joshua Newhard of the Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed when sent a picture.

It is traditionally prepared as “one fish, two ways”: stir-fry the body and cook the head, tail and bone for soup.

One fish, two ways. A delicacy in China, a killer in the United States.

 

Solar on the Water

 

Already, 144 solar panels sit atop pontoons moored on a three-acre irrigation pond surrounded by vineyards in Petaluma in Sonoma County. Some 35 miles to the north, in the heart of the Napa Valley, another array of 994 solar panels covers the surface of a pond at the Far Niente Winery.

“Vineyard land in this part of the Napa Valley runs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 an acre,” said Larry Maguire, Far Niente’s chief executive. “We wanted to go solar but we didn’t want to pull out vines.”

The company that installed the two arrays, SPG Solar of Novato, Calif., as well as Sunengy of Australia and Solaris Synergy of Israel, are among the companies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals. While it is a niche market, it is potentially a large one globally. The solar panel aqua farms have drawn interest from municipal water agencies, farmers and mining companies enticed by the prospect of finding a new use for — and new revenue from — their liquid assets, solar executives said.

Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine, according to Philip Connor, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Chris Robine, SPG Solar’s chief executive, said he had heard from potential customers as far away as India, Australia and the Middle East. When your land is precious, he said, “There’s a great benefit in that you have clean power coming from solar, and it doesn’t take up resources for farming or mining.”

Sunengy, based in Sydney, said it had signed a deal with Tata Power, India’s largest private utility, to build a small pilot project on a hydroelectric reservoir near Mumbai. Solaris Synergy, meanwhile, said it planned to float a solar array on a reservoir in the south of France in a trial with the French utility EDF.

MDU Resources Group, a $4.3 billion mining and energy infrastructure conglomerate based in Bismarck, N.D., has been in talks with SPG Solar about installing floating photovoltaic arrays on settling ponds at one of its California gravel mines, according to Bill Connors, MDU’s vice president of renewable resources.

“We don’t want to put a renewable resource project in the middle of our operations that would disrupt mining,” Mr. Connors said. “The settling ponds are land we’re not utilizing right now except for discharge and if we can put that unproductive land into productive use while reducing our electric costs and our carbon foot footprint, that’s something we’re interested in.”

Mr. Connors declined to discuss the cost of an SPG floating solar array. But he noted, “We wouldn’t be looking at systems that are not competitive.”

SPG Solar’s main business is installing conventional solar systems for homes and commercial operations. It built Far Niente’s 400-kilowatt floating array on a 1.3-acre pond in 2007 as a special project and has spent the last four years developing a commercial version called Floatovoltaics that executives say is competitive in cost with a conventional ground-mounted system.

The Floatovoltaics model now being brought to market by SPG Solar is the array that bobs on the surface of the Petaluma irrigation pond.

“We have been able to utilize a seemingly very simple system, minimizing the amount of steel,” said Phil Alwitt, project development manager for SPG Solar, standing on a walkway built into the 38-kilowatt array.

“With steel being so expensive, that’s our main cost,” Mr. Alwitt said.

Long rows of standard photovoltaic panels made by Suntech, the Chinese solar manufacturer, sit tilted at an eight-degree angle on a metal lattice fitted to pontoons and anchored by tie lines to buoys to withstand wind and waves.

The array, which is not yet operational, will be hooked up to a transmission line through a cable laid under the pond bed. Mr. Alwitt said that when the array is completed, 2,016 panels would cover most of the pond’s surface and generate one megawatt of electricity at peak output.

He noted that the cooling effect of the water increased electricity production at the Far Niente winery by 1 percent over a typical ground-mounted system.

 

Water Pumping Begins at Japan Nuclear Reactor

 

The Japanese government, meanwhile, said it was considering a plan to further restrict access to the evacuated area within 12 miles of the plant, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Some families have been re-entering the area to remove belongings, and dozens of people have never left.

At the plant itself, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said that it planned to pump 10,000 metric tons of water into a storage building at a rate of 480 tons a day, which would take nearly three weeks. The company is still working on ways to remove an additional 57,500 tons of heavily contaminated water at the same building, next to Reactor No. 2, and at other nearby buildings.

The cautious pace of the pumping and the volume of water to be moved are further signs of the complexity of the undertaking that faces Tokyo Electric. Removing the water is one of the 63 tasks that the company outlined Sunday in its plan to fully shut down the stricken reactors, halt all releases of radioactive material and restore reliable cooling and electricity roughly by the end of the year.

Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator in the United States, said that while the pumping might be proceeding slowly, a faster pace could prove dangerous.

“If a pipe breaks and you’re pumping hundreds of gallons a minute, you’re going to make a huge mess,” he said.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, the deputy director general of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said that the heavily contaminated water that had accumulated in basements and trenches at the site is two million times as radioactive as the less contaminated water that workers pumped into the ocean from April 4 to April 10. Workers pumped 10,393 tons of the less contaminated water into the ocean in order to make room in storage areas for the far more highly radioactive water from inside the reactor buildings.

Pumping contaminated water into the ocean has provoked considerable dismay from Japanese fishermen and from nearby countries, particularly South Korea and China. Mr. Nishiyama said Tuesday that Japan had no plans and no need to do so anymore.

Plans are being made for the installation of water-purification equipment and heat exchangers so that the same water can be pumped repeatedly through the reactors.

Anne Lauvergeon, the chief executive of Areva, France’s nuclear-power equipment provider, said at a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday evening that it would probably take until the end of May to set up a water treatment station at the plant. Once running, she said, it should be able to handle 50 metric tons of water an hour and should almost entirely remove the radiation.

The technology, called “co-precipitation,” uses chemical agents to remove radioactive elements from water. The treatment station itself will be provided by Veolia Water, a British water and waste management service. Areva and Tokyo Electric have not discussed the cost of the services, Ms. Lauvergeon said.

Areva, together with Veolia Water, will also provide three lines of desalination equipment to enable Tokyo Electric to convert seawater into fresh water for cooling the reactors. Fresh water provides better cooling; the spaces between the fuel rods have started to become congested with salt from seawater.

She also said that Areva was not preparing an overall plan to decommission the troubled plant, though she said the company was prepared to cooperate with any long-term process to eventually dismantle Fukushima Daiichi. Toshiba and Hitachi have submitted competing plans to dismantle the plant; the work could take decades.

In a further effort to improve cooling, Mr. Nishiyama said Tuesday that a decision had been made to flood the primary containment vessels of the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors with enough water to cover up the sides of the reactor pressure vessels up to the level of the uranium fuel rods.

This was not done sooner because only now have workers been able to determine that the primary containment vessels are sufficiently watertight. The vessel at the No. 2 reactor is damaged and leaking gases, and the leak or leaks need to be plugged before it can be flooded, Mr. Nishiyama said.

The No. 2 reactor has posed some of the greatest challenges in recent days, including another leak that spewed radioactive water until plugged two weeks ago.

Robots entered Reactors Nos. 1 and 3 on Sunday and measured the radiation inside. But when two robots entered Reactor No. 2 on Monday, the steam inside was so dense that a robot mounted with a camera was unable to get a clear image of a radiation sensor carried by the other robot, Japanese officials said.

Ken Ijichi, Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.