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 Fukushima Still Unstable: Japanese Officials
Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times
More than two years after multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a series of recent mishaps — including a blackout set off by a dead rat and the discovery of leaks of thousands of gallons of radioactive water — have underscored just how vulnerable the plant remains.
ncreasingly, experts are arguing that the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, cannot be trusted to lead what is expected to be decades of cleanup and the decommissioning of the plant's reactors without putting the public, and the environment, at risk.
At the same time, the country's new nuclear regulator remains woefully understaffed. It announced Wednesday that it would send a ninth official to the site - to monitor the work of about 3,000 laborers.
"The Fukushima Daiichi plant remains in an unstable condition, and there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident," Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, said at a news conference. "We have instructed Tepco to work on reducing some of the biggest risks, and we as regulators will step up monitoring."
The biggest scare at the plant in recent days has been the discovery that at least three of seven underground storage pools are seeping thousands of gallons of radioactive water into the soil. On Wednesday, Tepco acknowledged that the lack of adequate storage space for contaminated water had become a "crisis," and said it would begin emptying the pools. But the company said that the leaks will continue over the several weeks that it will likely take to transfer the water to other containers.
Plant workers dug these underground ponds about six months ago to store the ever-growing amount of contaminated water at the plant. There is about 400 tons daily from two sources: runoff from a makeshift cooling system rigged together after the site's regular cooling equipment was knocked out by the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, and a steady stream of groundwater seeping into damaged reactors.
Tepco stores more than a quarter-million tons of radioactive water at the site and says the amount could double within three years.
But as outside experts have discovered with horror, the company had lined the pits for the underground pools with only two layers of plastic each 1.5 millimeters thick, and a third, clay-based layer just 6.5 millimeters thick. And because the pools require many sheets hemmed together, leaks could be springing at the seams, Tepco has said.
"No wonder the water is leaking," said Hideo Komine, a professor in civil engineering at Ibaraki University, just south of Fukushima. He said that the outer protective lining should have been hundreds of times thicker.
Tepco's president, Naomi Hirose, traveled to Fukushima on Wednesday to apologize for the leaks, which he said had caused further distress to local residents. About 160,000 fled their homes in the wake of the disaster, and large areas around the plant remain off-limits.
Mr. Hirose said that Tepco would stop using the underground pits, and would pump the water out into more aboveground tanks. But Tepco says it is likely to take until at least the end of May to empty the pools. Mr. Hirose said that he did not think any water would reach the Pacific Ocean, because the pools lie at least half a mile inland.
"We're going to get the water out of these underground pits and into tanks as soon as we can," he said. "We're aware that this is a crisis that we must attend to with urgency."
But Muneo Morokuzu, a nuclear safety expert at the Tokyo University Graduate School of Public Policy, said that the plant required a more permanent solution that would reduce the flood of contaminated water into the plant in the first place, and that Tepco was simply unable to manage the situation. "It's become obvious that Tepco is not at all capable of leading the cleanup," he said. "It just doesn't have the expertise, and because Fukushima Daiichi is never going to generate electricity again, every yen it spends on the decommissioning is thrown away."
"That creates an incentive to cut corners, which is very dangerous," he said. "The government needs to step in, take charge and assemble experts and technology from around the world to handle the decommissioning instead." ....
"I could not agree more with Muneo Morokuzu, it is a problem for the World, not only for Japanese Tepco.
The decommissioning should be handled with care and as soon as possible by international experts and overseen by expert of an International Independent Organization !"
Ak Malten, Pro Peaceful Energy Use
The complete article -- Fukushima Still Unstable: Japanese Officials can be found at www.dianuke.org | |
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