Photo by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
While the chairman of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. still
holds out hope that the two undamaged reactors at Fukushima, Japan, can be salvaged, Japanese Cabinet Chief Secretary Yukio Edano objected to that idea Wednesday. He said all six of the reactors at the site would be shuttered permanently. The four damaged reactors may be covered in concrete. But that decision hasn't been made yet.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that TEPCO had a minimal disaster plan prepared in case of an accident at the nuclear facility:
Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s disaster plans greatly underestimated the scope of a potential accident at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, calling for only one stretcher, one satellite phone and 50 protective suits in case of emergencies." ...
The main disaster-readiness manual, updated annually, envisions the fax machine as a principal means of communication with the outside world and includes detailed forms for Tepco managers when faxing government officials. One form offers a multiple-choice list of disasters, including "loss of AC power," "inability to use the control room" and "probable nuclear chain reaction outside the reactor."
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that there are high levels of radioactivity from Cesium-137 tens of kilometers away the plant, something many expert observers have suspected for days. The IAEA also warned that an uncontrolled chain reaction is not out of the realm of possibility:
The risk to workers might be greater than previously thought because melted fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a press conference in Vienna. ...
Nuclear experts call these reactions "localized criticality," which will increase radiation and hamper the ability to shut down the plant. The reactions consist of a burst of heat, radiation and sometimes an "ethereal blue flash," according to the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory web site. Twenty-one workers have been killed by "criticality accidents" since 1945, the site said.
Meanwhile, the first money and time estimates for scrapping the reactors wrecked by the March 11 tsunami that disabled their cooling systems are trickling out: A trillion yen ($12 billion) and 30 years. That might be optimistic:
Japan Atomic Power Co. began decommissioning a 166-megawatt reactor at Tokai in Ibaraki Prefecture near Tokyo in 1998 after the unit had completed 32 years of operations, according to documents posted on the company’s website. The project will be completed by March 2021, or after 23 years of work, and cost 88.5 billion yen ($1 billion), the documents show.
Decommissioning the reactor at Three Mile Island after its partial meltdown in 1979 cost just under a billion dollars and took 12 years to accomplish. From a report by the World Nuclear Association:
The [TMI] cleanup was uniquely challenging technically and radiologically. Plant surfaces had to be decontaminated. Water used and stored during the cleanup had to be processed. And about 100 tonnes of damaged uranium fuel had to be removed from the reactor vessel—all without hazard to cleanup workers or the public.
Fukushima's circumstances are worse than that. But not so bad, experts say, as Chernobyl. There, site of the world's worst disaster at a commercial nuclear power facility, "decommissioning" is still not complete 25 years after the No. 4 reactor melted down. After burying it in sand, lead and boric acid, the Soviet Union built a concrete "sarcophagus" around it, an appropriate word given the event's effects. It's still deadly inside the jury-rigged sarcophagus, which is cracked and unstable. Last September, an international consortium began the first construction phase of a new sarcophagus, a 360-foot-high, 20,000-metric-ton arch that will be nudged forward on rails to cover the old sarcophagus. Cost: $2.2 billion, only 65 percent of which has so far been raised.
While Japanese officials are just beginning to consider the long-term arrangements, workers at Fukushima are still risking their health to get a handle on stabilizing the reactors in the short term.
Right now, that effort is directed toward containing a possible leak of radioactive water in reactor No. 2. Tony Roulstone, from Cambridge University's department of engineering, says that the problem may be from an extension of the reactor's containment vessel called the "torus":
"The indications are that either the torus or the pipes connecting it to the dry well containment around the reactor vessel have been breached," Mr Roulstone told BBC News.
"It seems the pressure from steam being relieved from the reactor was above its design pressure and that at some stage either that or a hydrogen explosion ruptured the torus or one of the connecting pipes."
"Now there seems to be water leaking out and causing these high levels of radioactivity."
Day 20 and counting.