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| TEPCO Workers at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Palnt |
Coping with the vast amounts of ground water flowing into the broken
Fukushima nuclear plant — which then becomes radiated and seeps back out
— has become such a problem that Japan is building a 35 billion yen
“ice wall” into the earth around it.
But even if the frozen barrier built with taxpayers’ money works as
envisioned, it won’t completely block all water from reaching the
damaged reactors because of gaps in the wall and rainfall, creating as
much as 50 tons of contaminated water each day, said Yuichi Okamura, a
chief architect of the massive project.
“It’s not zero,” Okamura said of the amount of water reaching the
reactors in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week. He
is a general manager at Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which operates
the facility that melted down after it was hit by a tsunami in 2011,
prompting 150,000 people to evacuate.
Workers have rigged pipes that constantly spray water into the
reactors to keep the nuclear debris inside from overheating, but coping
with what to do with the resulting radiated water has been a major
headache. So far, the company has stored the water in nearly 1,000 huge
tanks around the plant, with more being built each week.
TEPCO resorted to devising the 1.5-kilometer-long ice wall around the
facility after it became clear it had to do something drastic to stem
the flow of groundwater into the facility’s basement and keep
contaminated water from flowing back out.
“It’s a vicious cycle, like a cat-and-mouse game,” Okamura said of
the water-related issues. “We have come up against many unexpected
problems.”
The water woes are just part of the many obstacles involved in
controlling and dismantling the Fukushima Dai-chi plant, a huge task
that will take 40 years. No one has even seen the nuclear debris. Robots
are being created to capture images of the debris. The radiation is so
high no human being can do that job.
The ice wall, built by construction company Kajima Corp., is being
turned on in sections for tests, and the entire freezing process will
take eight months since it was first switched on in late March. The
entire wall requires as much electricity as would power 13,000 Japanese
households.
Edward Yarmak, president of Arctic Foundations, based in Anchorage,
Alaska, which designs and installs ground freezing systems and made an
ice wall for the Oak Ridge reactor site, says the solution should work
at Fukushima.
“The refrigeration system has just been turned on, and it takes time
to form the wall. First, the soil freezes concentrically around the
pipes and when the frozen cylinders are large enough, they coalesce and
form a continuous wall. After time, the wall increases in thickness,” he
said in an email.
But critics say the problem of the groundwater reaching the reactors was a no-brainer that should have been projected.
Building a concrete wall into the hill near the plant right after the
disaster would have minimized the contaminated water problem
considerably, says Shigeaki Tsunoyama, honorary professor and former
president of University of Aizu in Fukushima.
Even at the reduced amount of 50 tons a day, the contaminated water
produced at Fukushima will equal what came out of Three Mile Island’s
total in just eight months because of the prevalence of groundwater in
Fukushima, he said.
Although TEPCO has set 2020 as the goal for ending the water problems, Tsunoyama believes that’s too optimistic.
“The groundwater coming up from below can never become zero,” he said in a telephone interview. “There is no perfect answer.”
Okamura acknowledged the option to build a barrier in the higher
elevation near the plant was considered in the early days after the
disaster. But he defended his company’s actions.
The priority was on preventing contaminated water from escaping into
the Pacific Ocean, he said. Various walls were built along the
coastline, and radiation monitors show leaks have tapered off over the
last five years.
Opponents of nuclear power say the ice wall is a waste of taxpayers’ money and that it may not work.
“From the perspective of regular people, we have serious questions
about this piece of research that’s awarded a construction giant,” says
Kanna Mitsuta, director of ecology group Friends of the Earth Japan.
“Our reaction is: Why an ice wall?”
AP
