![]() To keep more water from seeping into the ground and being tainted, more than 90 percent of the site has been paved. There’s about one million tons of water kept in 1,000 tanks and the volume grows by 100 tons a day, down from 400 tons four years ago. Workers built an elaborate scrubbing system that removes cesium, strontium and dozens of other radioactive particles from the water some of it is recirculated into the reactors, and some goes into row upon row of giant tanks at the site. Water is being deliberately circulated through each reactor every day to cool the fuel within-but the plant lies on a slope, and water from precipitation keeps flowing into the buildings as well. TEPCO and its many contractors will be focusing on several battlefronts. The considerable time and expense are due to the cleanup being a veritable hydra that involves unprecedented engineering. “I think that we have to expect that the job will extend beyond the estimated time.” ![]() “In general, estimates of work involving decontamination and disposal of nuclear materials are underestimated by decades,” says Rod Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University. But some experts say even that could be an underestimate. Under a government roadmap, TEPCO hopes to finish the job in 30 to 40 years. The Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, said the cleanup costs could mount to some $470 billion to $660 billion, however. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion. WaterworksĬompletely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. “We are still conducting studies on the location of the molten fuel, but despite this we have made the judgment that the units are stable,” says Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s chief decommissioning officer for Daiichi. Despite setbacks, that effort is now moving forward in earnest, officials say. It will take a complex engineering effort to deal with thousands of fuel rods, along with the mangled debris of the reactors and the water used to cool them. In the years since the disaster and the immediate effort to stanch the release of radioactive material, officials have been working out how to decontaminate the site without unleashing more radiation into the environment. Meanwhile thousands of people living in the surrounding area were evacuated and Japan’s other nuclear plants were temporarily shut down. ![]() (TEPCO), responded by cooling the reactors with water, which continues today. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. This caused the nuclear fuel inside to overheat, leading to a meltdown and hydrogen explosions that spewed out radiation. When the disaster knocked out off- and on-site power supplies on March 11, 2011, three of the cooling systems for the plant’s four reactor units were disabled. But the process is still expected to be a long, expensive slog, requiring as-yet untried feats of engineering-and not all the details have yet been worked out. Seven years after one of the largest earthquakes on record unleashed a massive tsunami and triggered a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials say they are at last getting a handle on the mammoth task of cleaning the site before it is ultimately dismantled.
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