30 Years To Clean Up Fukushima Dai-Ichi

0WaitState writes "Damaged reactors at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant may take three decades to decommission and cost operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. Relatedly, Japanese officials and power plant operators are now working on the problems involved with disposing of 55,000 tons of radioactive water. '... international law forbids Japan from dumping contaminated water into the ocean if there are viable technical solutions available later. So the plant operator is considering bringing in barges and tanks, including a so-called megafloat that can hold about 9.5 megalitres. Yet even using barges and tanks to handle the water temporarily creates a future problem of how to dispose of the contaminated vessels.'" Yesterday's 7.1 aftershock caused brief power losses at three other nuclear facilities, and small volumes of contaminated water spilled, but no significant radiation leakage occurred before the problems were resolved.

Comments

Re:Nuclear economics

[blind biker]

Wind and solar, while definitely on the rise, will never completely replace base load power generation such as nuclear plants. Nuclear power plants can only be satisfactorily replaced by other base power sources such as coal-fired or natural gas-fired. Of the mentioned, nuclear is by far the cleanest and safest method of generating power.

I would like to repeat that statement, maybe it does penetrate the thick skull of ignorant people: Nuclear is the cleanest and safest base-load power generation by a HUGE margin.