Treated water at Fukushima plant still radioactive

Still unsafe: An employee walking past storage tanks for contaminated water at the nuclear plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture. — AP

TOKYO: The operator of Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant said that much of the radioactive water stored at the plant isn’t clean enough and needs further treatment if it is to be released into the ocean.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) and the government had said that treatment of the water had removed all radioactive elements except tritium, which experts say is safe in small amounts. They called it “tritium water”, but it actually wasn’t.