Normally, anniversaries are a cause for celebration; this
one for Fukushima is not.
I remember the day very well, since it was near my birthday,
and all the events that followed.
Watching the various news feeds generated the eventual facts that this
was a most serious event. I was stunned
at the reporting by Fox News and the other nuclear pontificators that this was
nothing to worry about, that it won’t have any human or environmental health
impacts, and that it would not deter the continued use and development of
nuclear power in Japan and the rest of the world. How wrong they were! With 54 reactors
constructed in Japan, only 3 are currently in operation. The following quotation is by one of the many
experts in the anti-nuclear battle. I
leaned very heavily on his research and information over the past 40 years, and
he has always been right on. He best
describes the current status.
“March 11 is the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima accident;
it’s really not over yet, since the site continues to produce vast amounts of
contaminated water. There is also no real answer for what will be done with the
molten cores of the reactors when they are eventually extracted. The cost of
decommissioning will run into hundreds of billions of dollars; it will take
decades. The most immediate threat is the official plan
to discharge about 1.3 million metric tons of radioactively contaminated water
– about 340 billion gallons – containing tritium, strontium-90, carbon-14 and
other radionuclides. This is the quickest and cheapest method of dealing with
it; it is also the dirtiest option by far, in my view. The proposed plan seems to be in violation of
the 1972 London Anti-Dumping Convention, which unequivocally bans the dumping
of radioactive waste in the seas. (Item 6 in Annex I, where the banned items
are listed, states “Radioactive wastes or other radioactive matter.”) The Biden
administration should join China, South Korea, Chile, and the Fukushima
region’s fishing community in protesting the plan. All of them should demand that TEPCO, the
power plant’s owner, do a global environmental impact statement comparing the
ecological and health consequences of all alternatives, including the option of
extracting the tritium and storing it for several decades till it is almost all
decayed away. That is the least that TEPCO and the Japanese government can do
before taking irreversible action to dump on their neighbors and a part of
their own food supply.” Arjun
Makhijani 3/7/21
Thirty-five years after the Chernobyl meltdown, not much
progress has been made in fully “decommissioning” that site. A big cover has been placed over the destroyed
reactor building, and much of the melted fuel remains at the bottom of the rubble. It seems the plan is to just let things
remain where they are, and not go to the trouble and expense of extraction,
packaging, and transporting the wastes to someplace else where it will just sit
and be monitored. The cover will protect
the building for about a hundred years, and then something else will be
proposed.
Again, I ask the question “How expensive is nuclear
power? What is the TRUE cost of the back
end requiring decommissioning and cleanup, whether from an accident or
malfunction, or just the eventual end of life for reactors, fuel facilities,
and the other huge and dirty part of their infrastructure? What is the incalculable cost of waste
disposal?
A couple of items making the current news cycle include the
beginning of the decommissioning of the tiny1.8MW nuclear reactor in
Alaska. Constructed in 1962 to power a
military base, it shut down in 1972.
After the spent fuel and much of the highly radioactive materials were
removed over the years (the actual cost is unknown,) the final decommissioning
of the site has been authorized to begin, costing $67 million, and will take 10+
years to complete.
In Hanford, the mega-project for the vitrification of the 56
million gallons of high-level waste is undergoing testing and start-up. Built by Bechtel for over $27 billion after
many cost overruns and 20 years of delay, the government is hopeful that it
will work…we all hope so! What it will
do is process the liquid soupy waste left over from the reprocessing of
high-level wastes from which Plutonium was extracted that has been sitting in
the tank farm since the ’40s and ’50s.
Vitrification does not solve the nuclear waste problem. What it does is de-liquify the sludge and mix
it with sand at high temperature producing “glass logs” which encapsulate the
high-level radionucleotides. The “logs”
are very radioactive, and will be added to the stockpile of spent fuel that
will ultimately be disposed of…Yucca Mountain…a monitored retrievable site in
Texas or New Mexico, or ??? They
probably will remain on-site at Hanford for perhaps forever; only now the waste
is solidified, rather than in a leaky liquid form. There is very little mention of the
radioactive and other toxic wastes produced in this process, and how they will
be dealt with. This project is supposed
to take 30 years. No mention as to how
much it will cost to run the show, or deal with the waste stream. Of note are the 600,000 gallons of similar
wastes stored at the defunct nuclear site in West Valley, New York, or the
thousands of gallons in Buffalo, or any of the contaminated locations
throughout the U.S. Will the
government/industry eventually build another of these smelters on-site, or will
they ship this highly dangerous stuff to Hanford? Or will it remain in-situ for ?????
The nuclear industry continues the many paths of trying to
stay relevant in the energy game. The “new”
technology promises to be SAFER and CHEAPER.
And yet, the question of the cost of the back end is never
addressed. The new Plutonium cooled
sodium reactors are still dreamed on the drawing boards, whose pilot projects
have failed on all levels here and in other countries, would require
REPROCESSING, producing a horrendous stream of liquid high-level wastes which
are difficult and expensive to deal with.
However, it continues a huge cash flow from the taxpayer and ratepayer
coffers to the huge corporations and their profits.
Let the sun shine…power to the people!
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