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Prevention of nuclear meltdown causes radioactive water problem

Cleaning the water could take many years, if not decades to complete. The cost could run into tens of billions of dollars..

Containing a calamity creates another nuclear nightmare, Sydney Morning Herald, Julie Makinen, Ralph Vartabedian April 9, 2011, TOKYO: For nearly four weeks, Japanese emergency crews have been spraying water on the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in a desperate attempt to avert the calamity of a full meltdown.The improvised solution to one nuclear nightmare is spawning another: what to do with the millions of litres of water that has become highly radioactive as it washes through the plant.

The water being used to try to cool the reactors and the dangerous spent fuel rods is leaking through fissures inside the plant, seeping through tunnels and passageways to the lowest levels, where it is accumulating into a sea of lethal waste. No one is sure how to get rid of it safely.

”There is nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before,” says Robert Alvarez, a former United States assistant secretary of Energy.

Japanese officials estimate about 57 million litres of highly radioactive water have accumulated and hundreds of thousands of litres are added daily as the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, continues to feed coolant into the leaky structures.

Ultimately, the water will have to be stored and processed and the highly radioactive substances solidified, a job that experts say almost must be handled in a specially designed industrial complex. Cleaning the water could take many years, if not decades to complete. The cost could run into tens of billions of dollars…….. A workforce in the hundreds or even thousands would take years or decades to clean up, experts said.

Containing a calamity creates another nuclear nightmare

April 9, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - Fukushima 2011, Japan, wastes