Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 21

TEPCO officials and the Japanese government have basically thrown in the towel on Fukushima Daiichi.  They have all but lost the battle with the six reactors, and at this point it's just as matter of time before the go-ahead is given to begin the work of "decommissioning" the plant.

And that work will take years, if not decades.

Japan will consider pouring concrete into its crippled Fukushima atomic plant to reduce radiation and contain the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano yesterday ruled out the possibility that the two undamaged reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six-unit Dai-Ichi plant would be salvaged. Units 1 through 4 suffered from explosions, presumed meltdowns and corrosion from seawater sprayed on radioactive fuel rods after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami cut power to reactor cooling systems.

Workers have averted the threat of a total meltdown by injecting water into the damaged reactors for the past two weeks. The complex’s six units are connected with the power grid and two are using temporary motor-driven pumps. Work to repair the plant’s monitoring and cooling systems has been hampered by discoveries of hazardous radioactive water.

The risk to workers might be greater than previously thought because melted fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a press conference in Vienna.

Radioactive chlorine found March 25 in the Unit 1 turbine building suggests chain reactions continued after the reactor shut down, physicist Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, wrote in a March 28 paper. Radioactive chlorine has a half-life of 37 minutes, according to the report. 

Oh, it gets worse.  Much, much worse.

Dismantling the plant and decontaminating the site may take 30 years and cost Tokyo Electric more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. The government hasn’t ruled out pouring concrete over the whole facility as one way to shut it down, Edano said at a press conference.

And personally, I think that $12 billion estimate is missing a zero at the end.  TEPCO will have to be nationalized, that is a given.  I have said all along that the total cost to Japan as a result of the Sendai earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster, will end up costing a trillion bucks.

I feel even more confident of that estimate now.