As if they did not have enough problems, the people heroically struggling to contain the Fukushima nuclear disaster are now facing a new and unprecedented crisis – caused by their own almost superhuman efforts.
Millions of gallons of highly radioactive water are accumulating on the site, as a result of drenching the stricken reactors to try to prevent them melting down, as the accident is officially raised to the most serious level available under international standards, a rating only previously awarded to the Chernobyl catastrophe twenty five years ago this month.
A lethal lake of some 15 million gallons of the stuff has already built up in the depths of the nuclear complex, and hundreds of thousands more are being added to it every day. It will all have to be made harmless before the site can be declared safe – and that, experts say, will take many years.
“There’s nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before”, Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy, told the Los Angeles Times. And Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the US Nuclear regulatory commission, added that it would be a “bigger job” than a similar clean-up operation planned at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation at a cost of $100 – $130 billion.
To make things worse, the complex’s main water storage tanks are already full. Indeed the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, controversially flushed a couple of million gallons of less contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean last week so as to make room for it. It is now thinking of pressing barges and tanks – including one that can hold two and a half million gallons of water – into service to take the excess, but this would itself create a new problem: how to decontaminate them afterwards.
Eventually the solution could be either to filter as much of the radioactivity water as possible out of the lake using zeolites – something successfully done after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident – or by concentrating it and binding it into glass. But even then it will take many years for the radioactivity to decay enough to make such operations possible. And the really big clean-up problem will still have to be tackled.
Millions of gallons of highly radioactive water are accumulating on the site, as a result of drenching the stricken reactors to try to prevent them melting down, as the accident is officially raised to the most serious level available under international standards, a rating only previously awarded to the Chernobyl catastrophe twenty five years ago this month.
A lethal lake of some 15 million gallons of the stuff has already built up in the depths of the nuclear complex, and hundreds of thousands more are being added to it every day. It will all have to be made harmless before the site can be declared safe – and that, experts say, will take many years.
“There’s nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before”, Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy, told the Los Angeles Times. And Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the US Nuclear regulatory commission, added that it would be a “bigger job” than a similar clean-up operation planned at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation at a cost of $100 – $130 billion.
To make things worse, the complex’s main water storage tanks are already full. Indeed the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, controversially flushed a couple of million gallons of less contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean last week so as to make room for it. It is now thinking of pressing barges and tanks – including one that can hold two and a half million gallons of water – into service to take the excess, but this would itself create a new problem: how to decontaminate them afterwards.
Eventually the solution could be either to filter as much of the radioactivity water as possible out of the lake using zeolites – something successfully done after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident – or by concentrating it and binding it into glass. But even then it will take many years for the radioactivity to decay enough to make such operations possible. And the really big clean-up problem will still have to be tackled.
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