Fukushima Reactor Leak Plugged with Liquid Glass: What's That?

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Early on Wednesday (April 6), officials at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan announced that radiation-contaminated water was no longer leaking out of the damaged reactors there and trickling into the ocean. Workers managed to plug the leak, they said, with a mixture of sawdust, newspaper, concrete, and liquid glass.

One of those things is not like the other.

Because of its strong adhesive properties, liquid glass is sometimes used to stick things together. When injuected into concrete, it also significantly reduces that material's porosity; in other words, it fills in the cracks. That property may have helped Fukushima workers block the leaking radioactive water.

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Natalie Wolchover
Natalie Wolchover

Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the  Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.