R
ReddyLeaf
Guest
On this 5 year anniversary of Fukushima, there are lots of news articles so feel free to search on your own....The Japanese cleanup is going to go on for much longer than expected, we hear now....
Not to pick on you or your comment but I highly doubt that anyone in the nuclear field "expected" this to be completed in even a decade or two. Maybe some media outlets, but certainly not anyone with a modicum of understanding. This isn't computer code or even a complex construction project. This is more like a war zone with radioactivity everywhere. Years ago I remember reading that soon after the accident during some initial assessments, workers found a "hot spot" with radiation that could kill a person in just a few hours. All of this was spread through out a spaghetti mix of destroyed buildings, tossed vehicles, and whatever the sea decided to leave. Nope, slow and careful is the best way to deal with this problem.
I will go on to say that multiple decades will be required. It took workers six years reached the fuel from Three Mile Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident. It's been five years since 3/11, but it may be another five or ten before they can deal with all the fuel at Fukushima. There is currently more liquid waste at Fukushima than at our nearby Hanford (site of plutonium production starting in 1943). Fukushima continues to leak in ground water while Hanford "stopped" production in the 1980's, treated wastes and placed most in engineered containment (except evaporation and low-level effluent). The devastation and massive remediation required at Fukushima is orders of magnitude greater than TMI, Chernobyl and even Hanford. Unfortunately, nearly everyone reading TMC today will have died by the time Fukushima is fully "stabilized" (notice that I didn't say "cleaned up" since there will still be measurable radioactive material from the accident for hundreds, if not thousands of years).
Here is a simply mind-boggling picture of one of the "easy" jobs. Those are individual "super sacks" (about 1 cubic meter) of miscellaneous trash that contain low levels of radioactivity (the really high level stuff must be sequestered behind feet of concrete).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-years-later-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-site-continues-to-spill-waste/
I also did a google search to find a few other pictures to express the scale of things. Here are tanks of treated water, again, low level radioactivity, and notice the scale, >100 million gallons by now (I found one reference to 90 MGal in 2014).
Here is an early picture (Mar 2012) of the really "nasty" stuff. Notice the surrounding barrier and yellow crane. Those are shielded ion exchange modules for removing cesium, strontium, cobalt, etc. This is the output from the water treatment system that is responsible for removing >90% of the water-soluble radioactivity. Here are some early article on this system:
https://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2011/11/30/shaw-and-avantech-have-success-implementing-new-water-treatment-system-at-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-power-station#.VuMlfnp8e0E
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/07/fukushima-water-treatment-system.html
Finally, I'm not sure what's the purpose of my post, other than to highlight the huge level of commitment that will be required for decades. These aren't mad scientists, engineers, managers or even politicians out to harm society. They're just trying to do the best they can, creating tools and methods as they go along, on a project of "a lifetime" that few can comprehend.