Tokyo Electric Power Co. has halted a system to decontaminate water being used to cool reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power after discovering a chemical leakage, Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday, referring to the plant operator.
TEPCO engineers found about 50 liters of chemicals that had leaked on the floor. The Nos. 1-3 reactors are being cooled with water that has already been decontaminated. TEPCO is now looking into how the leakage happened, Kyodo said.
The chemicals that are injected into the system developed by France's Areva to decontaminate radioactive materials are not toxic, the news agency quoted the plant operator as saying.
A 9.0-magnitude quake struck off Japan's northeast coast on March 11, triggering a tsunami and explosions at the Fukushima, which caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.
