Yup, it’s still going on.  

Water, water everywhere and hardly a drop not contaminated. Tepco workers still struggling with damaged reactor cores must inject water to keep them cool but, this results in radioactive water leaking into basement-levels of the damaged plants. Also over 15 million gallons of water that was pumped and sprayed over the plants during the height of the emergency must be cleaned-up. An engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists says Tepco’s problem  “resembles a board game with 16 squares and one empty spot,”    

The next step coming in two weeks called “…better than nothing”  

A potential turning point comes roughly two weeks from now, when Tepco plans to begin a treatment process in which water is sucked from the basement rooms and fed into a special tank, then treated with chemicals that eliminate its radioactivity. The process creates a byproduct of radioactive sludge, which is generally mixed with bitumen, poured into drums, then sealed and buried. The water itself can either be cycled back into reactors or discarded into the ocean.  

The treatment system is being set up by Areva, a French company that uses the technology at its La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant, off the Normandy coast. Since 1997, Greenpeace — after taking water samples from La Hague’s discharge pipe — has made repeated claims that the supposedly decontaminated water in fact contains radioactivity levels above the regulatory limit.    

The process “is not 100 percent, but it’s better than nothing,” David Lochbaum [Union of Concerned Scientists] said. “The alternative: you let the water simply evaporate and radioactivity carries to all parts far and wide.”  

The future of the site: Making nuclear lemonade?  

One plan recently reported under consideration would be convert Fukushima Dai-Ichi into a nuclear waste storage site. This means permanently storing the nuclear waste at the site of the damaged reactors.  

The Atomic Energy Society of Japan is studying the proposal, which would cost tens of billions of dollars, Muneo Morokuzu, a professor of energy and environmental public policy at the University of Tokyo, said in an interview yesterday. The society makes policy recommendations to the government.  “We are involved in intense talks on the cleanup of the Dai-Ichi plant and construction of nuclear waste storage facilities at the site is one option,” said Morokuzu.