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Common Dreams reports:
The public cost of cleaning up the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster topped ¥4.2 trillion (roughly [$41] billion) as of March, and is expected to keep climbing, the Japan Times reported [August 28].
That includes costs for radioactive decontamination and compensation payments. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) will sell off its shares to eventually pay back the cost of decontamination and waste disposal, but the Environment Ministry expects that the overall price of those activities could exceed what TEPCO would get for its shares.
Meanwhile, the taxpayer burden is expected to increase and TEPCO is asking for additional help from the government.
[...] Problems still persist at the nuclear plant, most notably with the highly contaminated water being stored in tanks at the site. [...] "The situation with contaminated water at the site is a ticking time bomb and they don't seem to know what they can do--other than to construct more tanks", [said Aileen Mioko-Smith, an anti-nuclear activist with the group Green Action Japan].
takyon: ¥4.2 trillion is approximately $41 billion at today's exchange rates, not $628 billion. You can reach the author of the Common Dreams article, Nadia Prupis, by the email or Twitter account listed on this page.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:20AM
The US Navy solved this problem decades ago. I am dumbfounded that it has not already been done for the Fukushima water.
What the Navy does with used reactor coolant is to make concrete out of it, then bury the concrete AND THE CEMENT MIXER at Hanford. (Except for one time the truck driver stole the cement mixer, which was found in his backyard.)
It's not like the Japanese can't read. There just has to be some good reason.
Note that concrete does not dry; it sets. That is, the water is bonded chemically with the Portland Cement powder, so the water stays in the set concrete.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:40AM
If I had to guess it is probably much cheaper... that is until something like this happens. But this kind of costs are never on the balance sheets...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:44AM
That's probably why. TEPCO has filtered much of the water, but tritium is costly to separate.
http://nautil.us/blog/no-one-knows-what-to-do-with-fukushimas-endless-tanks-of-radioactive-water [nautil.us]
One worker said that he did "a shoddy job" of building the tanks; another said he was told to apply sealant during rainy weather, which could keep it from adhering.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear-fukushima-labour-insigh-idUSBRE9B415P20131205 [reuters.com]
An official said that tanks had to be built quickly, and the quality of construction suffered.
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/fukushima-nuclear-plant-water-tanks-flawed-20131108?_escaped_fragment_=#! [weather.com]
Tritiated water can escape from cement:
Leachability - water not fixed chemically, is held physically as gel or capillary water in pore structure that extends through hardened cement paste. This water can exchange with external sources of water that penetrates into pore structure and diffuses through material.
--https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/36834/e-25-626_317251_fr.pdf [gatech.edu]
After a worker fell into one of the tanks and died, the government asked TEPCO to release the contaminated water into the ocean.
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/01/21/fukushima-watch-regulator-calls-on-tepco-to-discharge-tritium-water/ [wsj.com]
Tritium has a 12.3-year half-life, so after ~123 years, it's only 0.1% as radioactive as when it was made.
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday August 30 2016, @08:35AM
This is not reactor coolant water, it's groundwater that is infiltrating the basements of the destroyed reactors and picking up particles from the melted out cores.
Therefore, there are a number of radioactive isotopes which would not normally be in reactor water (as they'd usually be contained in the fuel rods).
Removing these isotopes has proved difficult, with the rate of decontamination not keeping up with the influx of new ground water.
https://dunrenard.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/analysis-tepco-behind-schedule-to-eliminate-contaminated-water-despite-extra-measures/ [wordpress.com]
These are only the beginning of the problems however; the melted cores of units 1, 2 and 3 are still in the basements of the reactors with no plan to extract them and there's a lot of material tht was ejected into the surrounding environment (including plutonium, probably mostly from when reactor 3 blew sky high).
It's a monumental disaster that Tepco would like to blame on a "natural disaster" but there were multiple failures before and after the earthquake/tsunami that resulted in the melt-throughs. This included not raising the sea wall despite their own modeling; using unapproved MOX fuel in reactor 3, having no way of remotely operating steam values and running reactors that were past their recommended lifetime.
The really scary thing is tht there's still over 20 of the exact same model reactors running in the US with the same known faults.
The nuclear industry is in rapid decline and none of these companies wants to pay for clean up or decommissioning so there are perverse incentives to run reactors decades beyon their service life. This matters because steel in the reactor vessel gets more brittle with exposure to radioactivity and reduces safety margins (particularly how quickly it's safe to do emergency cooling).
The real costs here will go on for generations, not to mention the land lost to production/habitation.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday August 30 2016, @09:03PM
This is not reactor coolant water, it's groundwater that is infiltrating the basements of the destroyed reactors [...]
It's both. Water is being pumped through the reactors to keep them cool. Some of it leaks out. There's also groundwater.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/5d0932a5a57a4c94821d7e8b5b3f8d4b/japan-prepares-release-tritium-fukushima-plant [ap.org]
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Friday September 02 2016, @08:00AM
True, I missed that still 100 tonnes a day being pumped in and then leaking from the fractured containment, what a mess!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:16PM
> I am dumbfounded that it has not already been done for the Fukushima water.
Hoover Dam is about 2.5 million cubic metres.
Fukushima has already decontaminated over one sixth of that volume of water, and they still have a giant problem dealing with the rest, stored in thousands of enormous tanks.
It's not about the coolant. That's out of reach and already lost anyway. The emergency cooling water, plus the water table leaking into the plant (literally flowing down the hill, hence the ice wall project), would allow you to repave most major Japanese highways with your mildly radioactive concrete.