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Sunday, March 25th, 2018

Clearing the Radioactive Rubble Heap That Was Fukushima Daiichi, 7 Years On

Author:     Tim Hornyak
Source:     Scientific American
Publication Date:     March 9, 2018
 Link: Clearing the Radioactive Rubble Heap That Was Fukushima Daiichi, 7 Years On
Stephan:   I really dislike civilian nuclear power for two reasons: 1) waste. 2) When something goes wrong it goes wrong at an unimaginable scale. I was able to see Chernobyl about nine months after the event, and have never forgotten that trip.  In reverse of that I once went through Fukushima region on a train when it was thriving, and look at the pictures now and empathize with the deep social pain this event wrought in the Japanese society . These things go out of  the news, Fukushima was seven years ago, and Chernobyl happened in 1986. But these catastrophes are still being lived; they are unhealed seeping social wounds. This report describes the current situation in Fukushima. Civilian Nuclear power was a creature of the cold war brought to life so there would be a career path for nuclear engineers and workers, encouraging science oriented students to pursue those paths.  Thus assuring that the military-industrial world had a sustaining pool of expertise.

A lone house sits on the scarred landscape, inside the exclusion zone, close to the devastated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on February 26, 2016. Credit: Christopher Furlong

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. 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.

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. This caused the nuclear fuel inside to overheat, leading to a meltdown and hydrogen explosions that spewed out radiation. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), responded by cooling the reactors with water, which continues today. Meanwhile thousands of people living in the […]

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