Via The Daily Yomiuri: Radioactive waste worries local governments / Officials seek guidance from central authorities on how to permanently dispose of sludge, ash. Excerpt:
Many local governments are troubled over how to handle waste containing radioactive cesium, including sludge discharged from water and sewage treatment plants, and ash.
According to surveys by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry and The Yomiuri Shimbun, more than 120,000 tons of such radioactive waste is being stored in Tokyo and 13 prefectures in the Tohoku and Kanto regions.
Although the government aims to establish a new law to create a government-led framework to dispose of the waste, it is uncertain whether this will resolve the problem quickly.
About 180 tons of sludge was being stored at a disposal site in Fukushima city as of Wednesday. Sludge is discharged when river water and sewage is purified at treatment plants--water treatment plants discharge sludge containing mostly earth and sand, while sludge from sewage treatment plants contains domestic wastewater and excrement.
Therefore, most of the sludge is incinerated to reduce its volume, after which it is buried or recycled into materials for cement.
At the disposal site in Fukushima's Horikawacho district, sandbags weighing one ton each were recently piled up inside an outdoor tank about 5 meters deep and surrounded by concrete walls 15 centimeters thick.
The bags were filled with dehydrated sludge containing radioactive cesium. Workers in protective suits lifted the bags into the tank with a crane.
The quantity of the radioactive sludge was increasing by about 14 tons a day, and according to workers, the 10 tanks at the site will be full by the end of the year.
