Officials are struggling with the latest set back at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant; flooded turbine rooms.

The turbine rooms are where the coolant is cooled, basically giant heat exchangers, or radiators. The problem is that the rooms have flooded with water that has mixed with fuel rods in the reactor cores, making the water highly contaminated.  Before they can do anymore work they have to get the water out.

Tokyo Electric Officials were thinking of pumping the contaminated water into the turbine condenser (it’s like a radiator on a car), but, oh yeah, the condensers already have water in them.  The contaminated water is so bad that it’s basically nuclear waste. You can’t just let it drain out into the ground water , or ocean.

So they are trying to drain the condensers, and then pump the contaminated water into the condensers. They’ve already begun on reactor 1 turbine room. Reactor 2 turbine room has radiation levels of 1,000 millisieverts per hour. TEPCo officials don’t know when they can attempt to drain reactor 2 turbine room because of the radiation levels.

They’re also dealing with a tunnel/trench found under the reactors, and found filled with contaminated water.