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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: 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!