Fukushima Toxic Waste Swells as Japan Marks March 11 Disaster: 2 Years

ENVIRONMENT, ASIA--PACIFIC, ENERGY, 11 Mar 2013

Jason Clenfield, Bloomberg – TRANSCEND Media Service

Every morning, 3,000 cleanup workers at the Fukushima disaster site don hooded hazard suits, air-filtered face masks and multiple glove layers. Most of the gear is radioactive waste by day’s end.

Multiply those cast-offs by the 730 days since a tsunami wrecked the Dai-Ichi nuclear station two years ago and the trash could fill six Olympic swimming pools. The tens of thousands of waste bags stored in shielded containers illustrate the dilemma of dealing with a nuclear accident: Everything that touches it becomes toxic.

Contaminated clothing represents just a fraction of the waste facing Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) in a cleanup that may take four decades. A tour of the plant last week went past rows of grey and blue tanks holding enough irradiated water to fill 100 Olympic pools on the plateau overlooking Dai-Ichi’s four ruined reactors. And the water keeps coming.

The utility estimates it may be eight years before radiation levels fall enough to let workers start the main task of removing 260 tons of melted nuclear fuel. That process took more than a decade at the U.S. accident on Three Mile Island, a partial meltdown at a single reactor containing about one fifth the amount of fuel at Fukushima.

“The things they have to do now are measured in years rather than days and months,” Gregory Jaczko, the former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a telephone interview. “What they have to do is very, very challenging. It’s hard to put a grade on how well it’s going because it’s so unprecedented.”

Some Progress

Still, little more than a year after the plant’s stricken reactors were brought into a controlled state known as cold shutdown, progress is visible.

A steel structure is being built to hold a crane for removing Unit 4’s spent fuel and Unit 1 is covered in a vinyl- coated shroud to help contain its radiation. Workers are preparing to drive a steel wall into the seabed to prevent water leaking from the plant into the ocean.

At Unit 4, which avoided a meltdown, steel braces have been added to reinforce a storage pool that holds 1,533 spent fuel rods five floors above the ground. By November workers will start to lift out the assemblies, removing one more source of risk.

“We have a lot of damaged fuel but we’ll make every effort to maintain safety while we push on with the decommissioning process,” site manage Takeshi Takahashi told reporters.

‘New Nuclear Age’

A poster at Dai-Ichi’s command center reads: “This is not the end. This is the beginning of a new nuclear age.”

Radiation danger prevents workers from approaching a tangle of metal and upturned cars surrounding Unit 3, which was ripped apart by a hydrogen gas explosion after the tsunami. Remote controlled cranes are used to pull steel and concrete rubble from the top of the structure.

Dosimeters register a jump to 1.7 millisieverts during a bus ride past the rubble, indicating a 60-minute exposure would equal eight months of natural radiation. It will be years before even robots can work inside the steel- and concrete-encased core, according to Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer at Burlington, Vermont-based energy consultant Fairewinds Associates Inc.

“Unit 3 is in a condition that none of us has ever imagined,” he said by phone. “The entire structure is inaccessible to human beings right now.”

Mountain of Waste

While clearing debris helps reduce radiation levels, it’s also filling the plant with toxic waste for which the utility has no ultimate disposal plan. More than 73,000 cubic meters of contaminated concrete, 58,000 cubic meters of irradiated trees and bushes, and 157,710 gallons of toxic sludge has built up, according to the utility.

Then there’s the water.

Tanks of it now cover an area equal to 37 football fields and the utility is clearing forest to make room for more. Some 400 tons of ground water each day seeps into reactor buildings and is contaminated.

There are 480 cesium-clogged filters, each weighing 15 tons, already warehoused in what the utility calls temporary storage.

“These filters will have to be stored for 300 years because cesium has a 30-year half-life and the rule of thumb is 10 half-lives,” Fairewinds’ Gundersen said.

Tokyo Electric has built a second plant it hopes will be able to extract the more than 60 radio-nucleotides remaining in the water after cesium is removed. Assuming the equipment works as intended, it will generate yet more contaminated filters.

‘No Plans’

Still, even in the best case, Tokyo Electric acknowledged the system won’t be able to strip out tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope. Tritium contamination will make it difficult to convince local fishing unions to agree to any release into the ocean as no matter how diluted the actual water molecules remain radioactive.

Tokyo Electric has “no plans” for what to do with the water once its filtered, plant manager Takahashi said. It will probably wind up back in tanks, spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai said, standing in front of the new treatment facility.

Some 700 vehicles leaving the plant each day are scanned for radiation. One in ten exceeds safety standards and must be washed, adding a few more buckets to the deluge of toxic water.

______________________________

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Clenfield in Tokyo at jclenfield@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Langan at plangan@bloomberg.net

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2 Responses to “Fukushima Toxic Waste Swells as Japan Marks March 11 Disaster: 2 Years”

1. satoshi says:

   13 Mar 2013 at 17:59

   What does the phrase a “New Nuclear Age” imply? Perhaps, it implies the “nuclear fusion” system. The conventional nuclear power plants, including Fukushima, Koodankulam and all other nuclear power plants in the world, employ the “nuclear fission” system that emits radioactive wastes. This system is the same as that of the atomic bomb that uses nuclear fission to generate an enormous amount of energy all at once to destroy the enemy. By nuclear fission, (1) an enormous amount of energy, (2) an extremely high temperature and (3) radioactivity (= radioactive wastes) are produced. On the other hand, by nuclear fusion, (1) an enormous amount of energy and (2) an extremely high temperature are produced, but not radioactivity. The nuclear fission system requires either “uranium 235” or “plutonium 239”, both of which are radioactive materials, while the nuclear fusion system requires “hydrogen” that is not a radioactive material. Get hydrogen from water (H₂O).

   However, there is no commercial/practical nuclear fusion system power plant in the world so far. It is because to cause nuclear fusion, especially to constantly cause it, is technically very difficult. The hydrogen bomb is a nuclear fusion system bomb. In theory, the hydrogen bomb does not emit radioactivity because of the nuclear fusion system. However, it actually emits radioactivity? Why? It is because the conventional hydrogen bomb uses the atomic bomb to cause the nuclear fusion reaction. In other words, the conventional hydrogen bomb is a hybrid bomb (= the hydrogen bomb + the atomic bomb). To cause nuclear fusion, it is necessary to accelerate and/or compress plasmoids in order to generate an extremely high temperature. (A plasmoid is a deviate of plasma. Read a textbook of electro-physics or of plasma-physics.) “Plasmoids with an extremely high temperature” and “hydrogen” cause a nuclear fusion reaction. How to generate an extremely high temperature and how to continue generating an extremely high temperature are main problems for the nuclear fusion system power plant. Remember that the Sun is a natural nuclear fusion reactor whose surface temperature is approximately 5,000◦C or 9,980◦F and whose core, with the temperature is approximately 15,000,000◦C or 27,000,000◦F, causes nuclear fusion reactions one after another. (See http://www.solarviews.com/eng/sun.htm and/or http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1997/GlyniseFinney.shtml )

   However, it is too difficult for humans, at the contemporary level of technology, to create such a high temperature. That is why researchers of nuclear fusion are searching for a method for (relatively) low temperature nuclear fusion (“LENR” or low energy nuclear reaction). In fact, some small scale nuclear fusion systems are available even now but not a secured and large scale fusion system, so far, for the commercial use to feed necessary amounts of electricity for millions of people, as mentioned above.

   A New Nuclear Age? When? Not in the foreseeable future for TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company). Imagine this: If each house-hold begins to use a small nuclear fusion system device, they do not need to be supplied by TEPCO anymore. You never know that one day, GM, Panasonic, Philips, Toshiba and any their home electric appliance companies might sell small size nuclear fusion reactors for home-use. It is not a dream. What will TEPCO do, then? Also imagine that, one day, each house hold in Koodankulam beings to use a small scale nuclear fusion generating device.

2. satoshi says:

   14 Mar 2013 at 14:02

   Corrections:

   In the last paragraph:

   The 4th line from the top: “GM” =>> “GE”.
   The 2nd line from the bottom: “beings” =>> “begins”.