Some 8.5 tons of radioactive water leaked from a reactor at Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant but it had not flowed outside the reactor building, Kyodo News said on Wednesday, quoting the plant’s operator.

Tokyo Electric Power Company said the leak occurred in the No 4 reactor after a pipe connected to the reactor dropped off, the news agency reported.

The leak was discovered Tuesday night and was stopped shortly afterwards.

The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) is totally safe, asserts the expert group constituted by the Government of India.

In a release, A.E. Muthu Nayagam, group convenor, said, “Based on its extensive examination of various issues, there should be no cause for concern about the safety” of the plant.

DU’s Radiation Fiasco Prompts Govt To Plan Mobile Detection Systems. Fear of exposure to radiation from scrap or medical waste may soon be a thing of the past. The central government will set up mobile radiation detection systems in 35 major cities across the country. “We shall be setting up 1,000 such systems across the country,” said M Shashidhar Reddy, vice-president, National Disaster Management Authority. “In Chennai, these systems will be set up in 70 police stations. They are portable and can be attached to a police patrol vehicle or used as a handheld device,” he said.

Japan's stricken nuclear power plant has leaked more than 600 liters of water, forcing it to briefly suspend cooling operations at a spent-fuel pond at the weekend, but none is thought to have escaped into the ocean, the plant's operator and domestic media said.

The Fukushima plant, on the coast north of Tokyo, was wrecked by a huge earthquake and tsunami in March last year, triggering the evacuation of around 80,000 people in the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years.

Japan said Thursday that it would begin a cleanup this spring of radioactive contamination near the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, with the goal of cutting radiation levels in half within two years. The Environment Ministry said the cleanup would cover about two-thirds of the 100-square-mile zone around the plant that was evacuated after last March’s accident.

The United States must urgently work to find a new central site to house its spent nuclear fuel and probe whether Japan's nuclear disaster has any safety implications for storage at the country's plants, a federal panel said on Thursday.

The U.S. government has struggled with how to manage the 65,000 tons of radioactive waste produced by its nuclear reactors over decades and stored throughout the country.

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Japan today near the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, but did not cause any further problems at the power station, officials said. The quake hit in the Pacific, 22 kilometres east of Iwaki in southern Fukushima, at 12.20 pm (0320 GMT) at a depth of nine kilometres, the US Geological Survey said. A tsunami was not expected, said the Japan Meteorological Agency, and there were no immediate reports of damage.

It has unparalleled safety features, says technical team

The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) has come up with unparalleled safety features and it has been constructed in such a way that it shall withstand any sort of natural calamity, be it earthquake or tsunami.

Decommissioning the wrecked reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will take 40 years and require the use of robots to remove melted fuel that appears to be stuck to the bottom of the reactors’ containment vessels, the Japanese government said on Wednesday.

Sri Lanka's health minister Maithreepala Sirisena has appointed a high-powered committee to investigate the waste disposal from the National Cancer Institute after the National Atomic Energy Authority (NAEA) has found some radioactive substances in bathing wells and a paddy field in the areas surrounding the hospital in Maharagama.

Western Provincial Environment Minister Udaya Gammanpila yesterday has brought the issue to the attention of the authorities.