Okamura and his team utilized equipment that should have cooled the reactors successfully with recycled water. However, contaminated water continues to increase due to ground water seeping through cracks and into the reactor and turbine basements.

“They are working on a way to treat the contaminated water and reduce the hazard, but that’s hard to do,” said Associate Professor of Geology David Dobson.

“Even if they achieve what they think is a safe level of radioactivity to release, that will be a very unpopular idea,” Dobson continued. “In the meantime, they have to keep building storage for more and more contaminated water.”

Tokyo Electric Power Company, the company behind the Fukushima plant, has tried to make space for more of these large storage tanks by cutting down trees.

The company predicts that the amount of water will triple within three years.

“There are pools of some 10,000 or 20,000 tons of contaminated water in each plant, and there are many of these,” said nuclear engineer Masasahi Goto to news source Al Jazeera...