Typhoon Hagibis struck Japan over the weekend... and apparent failures in the management of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant seem to have caused radioactive waste to be swept away.
Our Eum Ji-young has more.
The powerful Typhoon Hagibis hit Japan over the weekend, affecting large parts of the country,... including Fukushima Prefecture, the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.
Thousands of bags containing radioactive waste generated during decontamination work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were swept away by heavy precipitation last weekend and many of them are still missing.
According to Japan's public broadcaster NHK, officials from the city of Tamura in Fukushima Prefecture said on Sunday that an unknown number of bags filled with contaminated waste were lost.
Only 10 of the bags were retrieved, and some 27-hundred bags remain unaccounted for.
City officials say they cannot keep track of the missing bags.
There are roughly 95 similar storage facilities in Tamura city.
"The lost bags contain radioactive grass, trees and other material that had been gathered during decontamination work at the site of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which was damaged in 2011."
The bags of radioactive waste were most likely swept into a nearby river which eventually flows into the Pacific Ocean.
Local media claimed that no particular safety measures were in place even though record-breaking precipitation by the typhoon had been projected.
There are also reports that alerts were issued 8 times at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant warning that radioactive water was leaking from the plant.
However the officials said the alerts were due to a malfunction in the system.
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