#Contaminated Water Processing: AREVA Overachieved, Kurion Underachieved, But Full-Run Ready Next Week

According to TEPCO, Kurion's system reduced radioactive cesium in the highly contaminated water at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant to about 1/16 (or Decontamination Factor (DF) of 16), again falling short of 1/1,000 as hoped for.

But that was made up by AREVA's system that reduced radioactive cesium to about 1/6,700 (Decontamination Factor of 6,700) after Kurion, making the entire system reduction at slightly over 1/100,000. Good enough to go, even though they had hoped for 1/1,000,000.

Kurion's system fared even worse than the previous test with highly contaminated water announced on June 22. So it may not be just a matter of switching the order of decontamination or changing the zeolite types.

(Kurion can blame "workers", like TEPCO does habitually...)

From TEPCO's handout for the press, June 24 (Japanese only, so far), I added the English labels, DF for each system, and spelled out the amount of nuclides. The higher the DF, the better the system performance is. (Click on the image for a clearer view.)

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