If all goes to plan, by next March Fukushima Daiichi’s four damaged reactors will be surrounded by an underground frozen wall that will be a barrier between highly toxic water used to cool melted fuel inside reactor basements and clean groundwater flowing in from surrounding hills.
Up to 400 tonnes of groundwater that flows into the basements each day must be pumped out, stored and treated - and on-site storage is edging closer to capacity. Decommissioning the plant will be impossible until its operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] addresses the water crisis.
Impermeable barrier? “We started work a month ago and have installed more than 100 pipes, so it is all going according to plan to meet our deadline,” Tadafumi Asamura, a Kajima manager who is supervising the ice wall construction, said as workers braved rain, humidity and radiation to bore holes in the ground outside reactor No 4, scene of one of three hydrogen explosions.
Last month workers from Tepco and the construction firm Kajima Corp began inserting 1,550 pipes 33 metres vertically into the ground to form a cordon around the reactors. Coolant set at -30C will be fed into the pipes, eventually freezing the earth to create an impermeable barrier.
But sealing off the four reactors - three of which melted down in the March 2011 disaster - is costly and not without risks. The 32bn-yen wall will be built with technology that has never been used on such a large scale.
“I’m not convinced the freeze wall is the best option,” Dale Klein, former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser to Tepco, told Kyodo News. “What I’m concerned about is unintended consequences. Where does that water go and what are the consequences of that? I think they need more testing.” Over the next eight months, 360 workers from Tepco and Kajima will work in rotating shifts of up to four hours a day. Each worker is wrapped in hazardous materials suits and full-face masks, along with tungsten-lined rubber torso bibs.
Not trouble-free Tepco’s record of mishaps suggests the wall project will not be trouble free. The firm has had problems freezing irradiated water that has accumulated in underground trenches, raising concerns that the ice technology is flawed.
“There have been challenges over the past three years, but major improvements too,” Fukushima Daiichi’s manager, Akira Ono, told visiting journalists. But attempts to address the build-up of contaminated water in reactor basements suffered a serious setback last year when storage tanks sprung leaks.
Malfunctions
The plant’s water-treatment facility, which can remove all radioactive nuclides except tritium, has been suspended several times owing to malfunctions. All three lines of the system are running again, but only on a trial basis, according to Tepco spokesman Yuichi Nagano.
“We hope to have treated all the contaminated water stored on site by next March,” he said.
Ono said the wall would work in tandem with a recently completed bypass that reroutes clean groundwater directly into the Pacific, and underground wells.
Ono dismissed suggestions that there would not be enough people to decommission the plant. “In a sense decommissioning a nuclear power plant is a backward—looking operation, but we face so many unprecedented challenges that I think of it as forward—looking,” he said, citing the deployment of newly designed robots to locate and remove melted nuclear fuel. “That’s the kind of thing that motivates our engineers to keep going.” —
