China ‘shocked’ by water leak at Fukushima nuclear plant

Beijing has expressed shock that Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant is still leaking radioactive water two years after it was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami.

In a stern statement yesterday after it was revealed that 300 tonnes of toxic water had seeped from a storage tank into the ground at the crippled seaside plant, the Foreign Ministry warned Tokyo to abide by a bilateral agreement to notify Beijing about the leakage.

Japan raised its severity assessment of the latest leakage, which was discovered on Monday, from level 1 on an eight-point international nuclear event scale to level 3, defining it as a "serious incident". That raised the gravity of the leak by a factor of 100.

It is the most serious incident at Fukushima since the meltdown of three of its six nuclear reactors when a massive tsunami generated by a magnitude-9 earthquake inundated the plant, triggering a nuclear catastrophe on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. Meanwhile, contaminated water continues to flow into the Pacific Ocean daily.

"We find it shocking to hear that radioactive water was still leaking into the Pacific Ocean two years after the Fukushima incident," the Foreign Ministry said. "We hope Japan can take practical and effective measures to mitigate the impact."