When the three meltdowns occurred because of the tsunami at Fukushima in 2011 one of the three Meltdowns was a plutonium reprocessing site. If you understand weapons grade plutonium reprocessing it means that for 25,000 to 50,000 years that meltdown site will leak radiation into the ocean through ground water seeping back to the ocean.
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New Quake Tests Resilience, and Faith, in Japan's Nuclear Plants
| New York Times | - |
Officers
at the Fukushima prefectural office gathered data on Tuesday following
an earthquake that hit the area. Credit Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse -
Getty Images.
TOKYO — There was no avoiding fearful memories of the Japanese nuclear disaster of 2011 on Tuesday morning after a powerful earthquake
off the coast of Fukushima caused a cooling system in a nuclear plant
to stop, leaving more than 2,500 spent uranium fuel rods at risk of
overheating.
But
this time, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the utility that
operates three nuclear plants, restored the cooling pump at the Fukushima Daini
plant in about an hour and a half. The Daini plant is about seven miles
south of Fukushima Daiichi, the ruined plant where three reactors
melted down five years ago after tsunami waves inundated the power
station and knocked out backup generators.
Tepco
reported that it never lost power at either the Daini plant or its
neighbor to the north after the Tuesday quake, which had a magnitude of
7.4, according to the Japanese weather service. “We took the regular
actions that we should take when handling troubles,” Yuichi Okamura,
acting general manager of the nuclear power division at Tepco, said at a
news conference on Tuesday.
The
company was prepared for big tsunamis, having built sea walls rising to
about 46 feet at the Fukushima plants and enclosing backup generators
in waterproof facilities, Mr. Okamura said.
Critics
of Tepco, which struggled to keep on top of a crisis that unfolded over
the weeks that followed the calamity in 2011, said they were relieved
that there had been no immediate damage. But they said they remained
skeptical that the company had done enough to prepare for a disaster on
the scale of the earthquake five years ago. That quake, which had a
magnitude of 8.9, set off tsunami waves as high as 130 feet in some
places. (The highest waves on Tuesday reached about 55 inches.)
“It looks like the right things have been done,” said Azby Brown, director of the Future Design Institute at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology and a volunteer researcher with SafeCast,
an independent radiation-monitoring group. “But you never know until
something happens. As far as this morning goes, they did a decent job,
but mainly because it wasn’t that big of an earthquake or that big of a
tsunami.”
Building
higher sea walls, for example, “is all good, but that is like fighting
the last war,” Mr. Brown said. “It remains to be seen how well prepared
they would be for some other unusual combination of disasters.”
Compared
with five years ago, Tepco has improved its communication with the
public, reporting information about the cooling pump at Daini almost as
it happened on Tuesday morning.
The
company also quickly said that it had suspended the treatment and
transfer of contaminated water from the Daiichi plant, where an
extensive cleanup and decommissioning process is underway. By the
evening, those operations had been restored.
“What
I can say is today’s response was decent and they seemed to be
confident,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the Research Center for
Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. But, he said, it would
be difficult to independently verify Tepco’s claims because the
Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority depends on the company to release
information.
He
added that he was not convinced that Tepco was being fully transparent
about its decisions, particularly about the cleanup at the Daiichi
plant. “We should be informed fully whether this operation is reasonably
done with cost effectiveness and safety and making sure that the best
technology is being used,” Mr. Suzuki said.
Daisuke
Maeda, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulation Authority, said the
agency had offices on the sites of the nuclear plants and worked with
Tepco and other utility companies on Tuesday to confirm that the power
stations were safe after the earthquake.
Regarding
the longer-term situation, nuclear experts expressed concern about the
safety of the cleanup operation at the Daiichi plant.
The
melted cores of three reactors have yet to be removed as they are still
too radioactive for workers to approach. Since the 2011 disaster,
groundwater seeps into the reactors daily. The water, contaminated by
the melted fuel rods, needs to be treated and stored on site. So far,
Tepco has built more than 880 tanks of about 1,000 tons each.
The
tanks are inspected four times a day to confirm that they do not leak,
said Mr. Okamura of Tepco. And in an effort to halt the flood of
groundwater into the damaged buildings, the company has built an
underground wall of frozen dirt nearly a mile in length encircling the
reactors. The wall is not yet fully frozen, though, and groundwater
continues to flow into the reactors.
Critics
worry that the sea walls or storage tanks might not withstand a more
powerful earthquake or tsunami. And Tuesday’s incident at the Daini
reactor showed that quakes can set off problems even at plants that are
not operating.
Most
of the country’s 54 plants remain closed since the 2011 disaster, but
the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to restart most of
them.
A
majority of the Japanese public is opposed to such a move. Candidates
for governor who ran campaigns opposed to the revival have won elections
in recent months in two prefectures that host nuclear plants.
According
to the Nikkei Shimbun, a Japanese daily, Fumio Sudo, the chairman of
Tepco, and Naomi Hirose, the company’s president, were planning to meet
on Tuesday with one of those governors, Ryuichi Yoneyama of Niigata, to
try to persuade him to support a restart of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant
there. Mr. Sudo and Mr. Hirose returned to Tokyo after the earthquake.
Kiyoshi Kurokawa,
who oversaw an independent investigation on the Fukushima nuclear
accident for the Japanese Parliament, said that building walls and
storage tanks failed to solve the underlying problem of an
earthquake-prone country relying on nuclear power. Instead, he said,
both the government and utility companies should invest in developing
alternative sources of power like solar or wind technology.
“I
think we expect more of such readjusting plate movements and that has
been reasonably predicted, and many volcanic activity and earthquakes
have been rampant over the last five years,” said Mr. Kurokawa, an
adjunct professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
“So why are we continuing to restart nuclear plants?”
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