Fukushima's ground zero: No place for man or robot

[WhiteTara]

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/fukushimas-ground-zero-no-place-man-robot-030823808--finance.html

Reuters) - The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake and tsunami.

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) <9501.t>, has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed.

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”



and the radioactive water still flows into the ocean.

[gratuitous]

1. Five years down the line, and they're still fighting a rearguard action

From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-disaster.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

Fukushima has become a place where employees arrive on company shuttle buses and shop at their own on-site convenience store, but where they struggle to control radiation-contaminated water and must release it into the sea. Many of the most difficult and dangerous cleanup tasks still lie ahead, and crucial decisions remain unsettled.

But by all means, let's build some more nuclear plants. We'll figure out what to do with the radioactive waste someday, and there's hardly any catastrophes to talk about.

[yuiyoshida]

2. A-bomb survivors demand court shut western Japan nuclear plant

HIROSHIMA (Kyodo) -- Plaintiffs including survivors of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings filed a lawsuit Friday with a court demanding a halt to operation of Shikoku Electric Power Co.'s Ikata nuclear plant in western Japan.

They brought the suit to the Hiroshima District Court, arguing that the environment would be devastated and their health affected if an accident similar to the 2011 Fukushima disaster takes place at the plant in Ehime Prefecture, their lawyers said.

Friday is the fifth anniversary of a major earthquake and tsunami that triggered the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant of Tokyo Electric Power Co.

The three reactors at the Ikata plant are currently off-line but Shikoku Electric envisions rebooting the No. 3 unit in the spring or later. The reactor cleared a safety screening last July.


http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160311/p2g/00m/0dm/071000c