Highly Radioactive Water Again Found Leaking at Fukushima Plant

Water so contaminated that it could expose a person to five years worth of radiation in just one hour was found leaking out of a storage container at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power station, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) reported Tuesday.

About 300 metric tons of contaminated water leaked from a storage tank, Tepco said, adding that this incident is separate from reports of contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, which have stated that the same volume of water is seeping out of the reactors' drainage system and into the area's groundwater every day.

Some of that water is leaking into the Pacific Ocean, but it is not clear how much.

The water leaking from the storage container is highly radioactive, emitting 100 millisieverts of radiation an hour --  enough that a person standing less than 2 feet away would receive five times the annual global limit of radiation for nuclear workers in just an hour, Reuters reported. In 10 hours a person standing near the water would begin to exhibit symptoms of radiation sickness.

Michiaki Furukawa, a nuclear chemist and professor emeritus at Nagoya University, told Reuters that is "a huge amount of radiation."

"The situation is getting worse," he said.

The beleaguered nuclear plant has been dealing with a seemingly never-ending string of problems over recent months, everything from power failures, contaminated groundwater, more leaks and the daunting challenge of where to store the huge volume of contaminated water that is a byproduct of keeping the broken nuclear reactor cores from overheating and melting down.

A devastating combination of powerful earthquake and massive tsunami crippled the plant in March 2011 and Tepco has been trying to maintain the situation ever since, though recently the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for the government to step in to assist with the Fukushima situation, calling it an "urgent problem."