Fukushima operator may have to dump contaminated water into Pacific

[dipsydoodle]

A senior adviser to the operator of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has told the firm that it may have no choice but to eventually dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.

Speaking to reporters who were on a rare visit to the plant on the eve of the third anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, Dale Klein said Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] had yet to reassure the public over the handling of water leaks that continue to frustrate efforts to clean up the site.

"The one issue that keeps me awake at night is Tepco's long-term strategy for water management," said Klein, a former chairman of the US nuclear regulatory commission who now leads Tepco's nuclear reform committee.

"Storing massive amounts of water on-site is not sustainable. A controlled release is much safer than keeping the water on-site.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/10/fukushima-operator-dump-contaminated-water-pacific

[burfman]

1. why are we still building & running these things?

I feel that the question is not if Tepco decides to dump low level radioactive waste into the ocean rather than let it evaporate into the air. It is - what are we doing pretending these things make economic sense in the first place.

You would think people would figure out that if an atomic reactor melts down, cracks open (which has happened twice now & almost a third time at 3 mile island) - makes a good chunk of land uninhabitable for the foreseeable future with radio active cesium - it would ruin any economic reason for their further construction or their continued operation. Let's put aside for the moment those other unresolved problems such as where to store the radioactive waste the existing ones generate on a good day. It will be interesting to see how much it will cost and how long it will take to clean this one up - I've heard 40 years and 100+ billion dollars in an engineering journal - it's needless to say an extremely hard problem - think lots of robots that haven't been even designed yet as people can't get near the messy critical places to do any work. In general it's very hard to make anything fail proof and economic - especially when the consequences of failure are unthinkable. For example the Earth quake that was in the DC area a couple of years ago was centered close to an atomic power plant in Virginia - I recall the magnitude of the Earth quake was very close to the design limit of the reactor.