True, they aren’t going to just give up, but they’re rapidly running out of storage tanks and the decontamination equipment doesn’t seem to be able to keep up. Right now they’re talking about dumping decontaminated water into the ocean, which has fishermen nervous. They don’t have any confidence in TEPCO anymore.
I found the article/video I saw yesterday. Fukushima has recorded 1800 stress-related suicides so far.
They’ve made some progress cleaning up the fourth reactor building because it wasn’t running when the tsunami hit. The other three reactors can’t be entered because it’s instant death. TEPCO claims it will take 40 years to clean up, others say centuries.
Considering Chernobyl had no containment, and no fuel pools full of old fuel rods, and they aren’t even considering ever “cleaning it up”, it’s likely nothing will ever be done to fix “the problem”, certainly not in our lifetimes.
First they have to design, invent, engineer and build robots that are immune to radiation damage. Nobody has ever built even a prototype, much less a working model.
The sad horrible truth is, once a core melts down, or blows up, nothing can approach it to do anything, much less “remove” it, like there is anyplace to actually move any of the spent fuel to.
Makes you wonder what all those risk assessors and contingency planners were thinking. The technology needed to deal with a meltdown hasn’t even been invented yet.
No worries. Our calculations tell us accidents only happen every million years or so. We have plenty of time for [del]scientists[/del] science fiction writers to think of something.
It just turns out they didn’t anticipate a historic earthquake and subsequently historic tsunami.
All this actually says very little of the risk of building a nuclear plant in the middle of Nowheresville, Nevada and burying the waste deep underground where it has minute chance of ever causing a problem for humanity.
The Japanese are familiar with earthquakes and tsunamis. The “they” in this case are the people who claimed events that were already known to happen, were suddenly inconceivable. The plant owner up the coast from Fukushima knew, and built a large sea wall based on known past events. People scoffed. His plant is still there.
It’s not that they didn’t anticipate this. They refused to anticipate it.
Anyhoo, it’s tough to build a plant in Nowheresville when plants need massive amounts of water for cooling and no one wants to build the long distance wires needed to get the power to where it’s needed.
Building nuclear power plants on the moon and wirelessly sending the energy back to Earth would be very safe though.
They have a whole army of robots working inside the plant. They are giving their all and will probably never be used outside the reactor due to high radiation contamination.
