11,500 tons of radioactive water was dumped by Japan on Monday into the Pacific Ocean in order to curtail a worse leak from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

This was an emergency move by the Japanese officials .the radiation water was drained to the highest from reactor no. 5 and no. 6.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company officials who run the plant suggested to release the excess water that has pooled in and around the reactor No. 5 and 6 into the sea. Reactors No. 1 and No. 3, had the lower level of water, but they decide to drained this reactors with the others.

The water in reactor no.5 and no.6 comes from a sub drain and wasn’t inside the building said by the officials. But most of the dumped water i.e. 10,000 tons come from the plant’s central waste treatment facility.

“The radioactivity level was very high near the No. 2 reactor so they have to stop the leak as early as possible to prevent this from going into the sea.

In order to prevent full reactor meltdowns at the tsunami-hit plant hence they poured thousands of water onto overheating fuel rods, a stop-gap measure that created highly radioactive run –off. The liquid was most likely contaminated in the process of trying to cool nuclear fuel rods.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano called the dumping “unavoidable.”

11,500 tons means one metric ton is 1,000 kilograms or about 2,200 pounds, which is close to an English ton. Water is about 8.5 pounds per gallon (which is a measure of volume approximately equal to four liters), so one ton is about 260 gallons,” said Gary Was, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan. “So 11,500 tons is about 3 million gallons. A spent fuel pool holds around 300,000 gallons. So this amount of water is equivalent to the volume of roughly 10 (spent fuel pools).”

To put this in simple words , the Pacific Ocean holds about 300 trillion swimming pools full of water and they’re going to release about five swimming pools full of water. So hopefully the churning of the ocean and the currents will quickly disperse this so that it gets to very dilute concentrations relatively quickly.

It could around 50 hours to dump all the water, said by the Tokyo electric officials.

source: CNN