On 17 June 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company turned on a water decontamination unit, recently installed at its damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.  It failed.

Just five hours after turning the unit on, they had to shut it down.  The radiation was far higher than what the decontamination unit was meant to handle.

TEPCo ran the unit on Sunday, 19 June, to try and figure out where the spike in radioactive water was coming from.  That lasted four hours.  They concluded that the radiation contamination must be far higher than what they first thought (replace that with “wild ass guessed”).

TEPCo will try adding additional water decon units in the hopes of dealing with the radioactive water.  It’s estimated that 500 tons of water is being contaminated everyday (most of which is ending up in the Pacific Ocean).  Like Bill Nye the Science Guy said: “Why don’t they just dump concrete on it?”