Oboy - The latest round of tests with the Areva/Kurion water decontamination system are failing epically

What happened? Kurion, in particular, is probably getting an earful from Tepco right about now. This development is on the heels of Kurion's cartridge fail, where each one maxed out after just 5 hours of operation vs the one month time-frame they had earlier pitched to Tepco. From NHK:

Plant decontamination not working

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is looking into why a system for decontaminating radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is not working as expected, delaying resumption of the system's full-scale operation.

The firm on Wednesday published data showing the amount of radioactive materials that had been removed from contaminated water during a test run of the US-made system.

The data show that density of Cesium-13 and Cesium-137 dropped to only one-100th of initial levels.

An earlier test run using water with a lower density of radioactivity showed a drop to about one-1000th.

The utility had said the system would begin full-scale operation in a couple of days.

TEPCO on Tuesday began reducing the amount of cooling water injected into the plant's No. 1 to 3 reactors and is carefully monitoring changes in their temperatures.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 21:13 +0900 (JST)

If you recall, estimates were for a reduction in isotopes as high as 1/10,000th the original amount.

Hopefully, they will troubleshoot the problem and find a sustainable solution, because a 1/100 reduction won't cut it in the long term.

The timing couldn't be worse. Tepco is starting to limit the volume of water being used to cool the reactors because contaminated water levels are beginning to max out.