22:47
Tieng Anh Vui
Japan's nuclear agency wants to raise the severity level of a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima plant from one to three on an international scale.
Highly radioactive water was found to be leaking from a storage tank into the ground at the plant on Monday.
It was first classified as a level one incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Ines).
But Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority proposes elevating it to level three on the seven-point scale.
This week is the first time that Japan has declared an event on the Ines scale since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The move was announced in a document on the agency's website and was to be formally approved at a meeting, a spokesman told Reuters news agency.
Japanese reports said it was a provisional move that had to be confirmed with the IAEA, the UN's nuclear agency.
'Five-year dose'
The March 2011 tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors at the plant, three of which melted down.
Water is now being pumped in to cool the reactors but this means that a large amount of contaminated water has to be stored on site.
There have been leaks of water in the past but this one is being seen as the most serious to date, because of the volume - 300 tonnes of radioactive water, according to plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) - and high levels of radioactivity in the water.
A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, Kyodo news agency said earlier this week.
Masayuki Ono, general manager of Tepco, told Reuters news agency: "One hundred millisieverts per hour is equivalent to the limit for accumulated exposure over five years for nuclear workers; so it can be said that we found a radiation level strong enough to give someone a five-year dose of radiation within one hour."
Under the Ines, events have seven categories starting with Level 0 ("without safety significance") and Levels 1-3 denoting "incidents" while Levels 4-7 denote "accidents".
Đăng ký: Tieng Anh Vui
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