1st look at Japan nuke plant: rubble amid progress
DAVID GUTTENFELDER, Associated Press
ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press
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The Unit 4 reactor building of the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station is seen through a bus window in Okuma, Japan Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011. Media allowed into Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant for the first time Saturday saw a striking scene of devastation: twisted and overturned vehicles, crumbling reactor buildings and piles of rubble virtually untouched since the wave struck more than eight months ago. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, Pool)
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OKUMA, Japan (AP) — Two reactor buildings once painted in a cheery sky blue loom over the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Their roofs are blasted away, their crumbled concrete walls reduced to steel frames.
In their shadow, plumbers, electricians and truck drivers, sometimes numbering in the thousands, go dutifully about their work, all clad from head to toe in white hazmat suits. Their job — cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl — will take decades to complete.
Reporters, also in radiation suits, visited the ravaged facility Saturday for the first time since Japan's worst tsunami in centuries swamped the plant March 11, causing reactor explosions and meltdowns and turning hundreds of square miles (kilometers) of countryside into a no man's land.
Eight months later, the plant remains a shambles. Mangled trucks, flipped over by the power of the wave, still clutter its access roads. Rubble remains strewn where it fell. Pools of water cover parts of the once immaculate campus.
Tens of thousands of the plant's former neighbors may never be able to go home. And just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki become icons of the horrors of nuclear weapons, Fukushima has become the new rallying cry of the global anti-nuclear energy movement.
Yet this picture is one of progress, Japanese officials say. It has taken this long to make the plant stable enough to allow Saturday's tour, which included representatives of the Japanese and international media — including The Associated Press. Officials expect to complete an early but important step toward cleaning up the accident by the end of the year.
"I think it's remarkable that we've come this far," Environment Minister Goshi Hosono, Japan's chief nuclear crisis response official, said before leading the tour. "The situation at the beginning was extremely severe. At least we can say we have overcome the worst."
The group was taken through the center of the facility, a once-neat row of reactor buildings that are now shells of shattered walls and steel frames. Journalists were then briefed inside the plant's emergency operations center, a spacious, bunker-like structure where it is safe to remove the heavy protective gear required outdoors.
Woefully unprepared for the wave that swept over its breakwater, the plant just 140 miles (225 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo was doomed almost from the start.
"During the first week of the accident, I thought several times that we were all going to die," plant chief Masao Yoshida said.
At the height of the crisis, all but a few dozen workers — dubbed the "Fukushima 50" — were evacuated. Officials boast that number is now up to as many as 3,000 a day, compared with the pre-crisis work force of 6,400.
Evidence of the tremendous man-hours already invested in the cleanup is piling up in the workers' staging area, on the edge of the 12-mile (20-kilometer) no-go zone around the plant. More than 480,000 sets of used protective gear — which can be worn only once — lie in crates or plastic bags at the complex, which before the tsunami was a training facility for national-level soccer teams.
Kazuo Okawa, 56, who worked at Fukushima for 20 years, was called back to join an emergency crew for several days in April. His team wore three layers of gloves, full-face masks, double-layer Tyvek protective coveralls, rubber boots with plastic covers and plastic head covers. They carried personal Geiger counters.
"Obviously, it was very dangerous at that time," he recalled during a recent visit to Tokyo. "Luckily, we got out without experiencing any life-threatening situations."
Workers like Okawa — in Chernobyl they were called "liquidators" — have restored the plant's supply of electricity, set up elaborate cooling and drainage systems, rebuilt crumbled walls and erected a huge tent to cover one of the worst-hit reactors, cutting the amount of radioactivity leaking into the surrounding environment.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the plant, says it will achieve a "cold shutdown" by the end of the year — a first step toward creating a stable enough environment for work to proceed on removing the reactors' nuclear fuel and closing the plant altogether.
But that is by no means the end of the story.
A preliminary government report released this month predicted it will take 30 years or more to safely decommission Fukushima Dai-ichi. Like Chernobyl, it will probably be encased in a concrete and steel "sarcophagus."((
A stone coffin, often inscribed or decorated with sculpture.
))
Hiroaki Koide, a nuclear physicist at Kyoto University, said he doubts the decommissioning process will go as smoothly as the government hopes. He said pools for spent fuel remain highly volatile, and cleaning up the three reactor cores that melted through their innermost chambers will be a massive challenge.
"Nobody knows where exactly the fuel is, or in what condition," he said. "The reactors will have to be entombed in a sarcophagus, with metal plates inserted underneath to keep it watertight. But within 25 to 30 years, when the cement starts decaying, that will have to be entombed in another layer of cement. It's just like Russian Matryoshka dolls, one inside the other."
The no-go zone around the plant will likely be in effect for years, if not decades, to come. Officials reluctantly admit that tens of thousands of evacuated residents may never be able to return home.
Recent studies suggest that Japan continues to significantly underestimate the scale of the disaster — which could have health and safety implications far into the future.
According to a study led by Andreas Stohl the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, twice as much radioactive cesium-137 — a cancer-causing agent — was pumped into the atmosphere than Japan had announced, reaching 40 percent of the total from Chernobyl. The French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety found that 30 times more cesium-137 was released into the Pacific than the plant's owner has owned up to.
"We have not studied the content of their research, and are not in a position to respond," said Hiroki Kawamata, a TEPCO spokesman. "We have no plans at this point to modify our estimates."
Before the crisis, resource-poor Japan relied on nuclear power for about one-third of its electricity. It was planning to boost that share to 50 percent by 2030.
Without nuclear, Japan will have to import more fossil fuels, cutting its potential GDP by 1.2 percent and costing 7.2 trillion yen ($94 billion) annually, according to an estimate by the Japan Center for Economic Research.
But public support for nuclear power — and the trust that the industry is built on — has plummeted.
Tens of thousands of Japanese have turned out in protest. Suspicious of government and TEPCO reassurances, grassroots groups are scouring the country with radiation detectors. Several "hot spots" in and around Tokyo are now being investigated by the authorities.
Because of the outcry, Japan has essentially abandoned its long-term goal of expanding nuclear energy production. The status of even its existing plants is murky.
Currently, 43 of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors are shut down, either because of mechanical problems or routine inspections, which must be conducted every 13 months. Local approval is required to restart nuclear power plants, even after routine inspections, and local leaders fearing repercussions at the polls have been loath to provide it.
TEPCO announced two weeks ago there will be enough power to see the country through the winter, but after that, the effect of the nuclear crisis on electricity production could become even more acute. If political resistance remains as high as it is now, every nuclear reactor in Japan could be offline by May.
___
Talmadge reported from Hirono. APTN producer Miki Toda, at the plant, and writer Mari Yamaguchi, in Tokyo, contributed to this story.
Associated Press
Tepco may dump decontaminated water from Fukushima plant into sea
08 Dec 2011 06:47
* Tepco says groundwater inflow crimping storage space
* Fishing groups protest against Tepco
* Admission a step back in utility's cleanup process (Adds quotes; details in paragraphs 4-7)
By Shinichi Saoshiro
TOKYO, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant is considering dumping water it treated for radiation contamination into the ocean as early as March, the firm said on Thursday, prompting protests from fishing groups.
Tokyo Electric Power, (Tepco) the utility operating Fukushima's Daiichi plant, hit by a powerful tsunami in March that caused the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years, said it was running out of space to store some of the water it treated at the plant, due to an inflow of groundwater.
"We would like to increase the number of tanks to accommodate the water but it will be difficult to do so indefinitely," Tepco spokesman Junichi Matsumoto told reporters.
He said the plant was likely to reach its storage capacity of about 155,000 tonnes around March.
Tepco plans to come up with possible ways to handle radioactive waste and present its proposals to the government's nuclear regulatory body for approval.
"The government should not, and must not, approve a plan allowing Tepco to dispose treated water in the ocean," said Kenji Sumita, an emeritus professor at Osaka University who specialises in nuclear engineering.
"The reality is that semipermanent storage is the only solution available under current technological constraints. Tepco may have to find the storage space and look for a technological breakthrough in the coming years that allows it to condense and greatly reduce the volume of tainted water."
The admission is a setback for the utility, which appeared to be making progress in its cleanup after building a cooling system that no longer required pumping in vast amounts of water. It also built a system, drawing on French, U.S. and Japanese technology, that decontaminates the vast pool of tainted runoff to supply the cooling system with water.
The company said representatives of a nationwide federation of fishing cooperatives on Thursday visited its Tokyo headquarters to protest.
Tepco said it was still assessing the potential environmental impact of releasing the accumulating water, but that if forced to do so, it would discharge water expected to have the least effect on the environment.
Tens of thousands of tons of water contaminated with radiation have accumulated at the plant, 240 kilometres (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo after Tepco, early in the crisis, tried to cool reactors that suffered nuclear fuel meltdowns by pouring in water, much of it from the sea.
"Our priority is also to look for ways to limit the inflow of groundwater into the buildings at the plant," Matsumoto said.
The operator estimates that due to the inflow the amount of water requiring storage is increasing by 200 to 500 tonnes every day.
The utility released more than 10,000 tonnes of water tainted with low levels of radiation in April to free up space for water with much higher levels of radioactivity, drawing sharp criticism from neighbours such as South Korea and China. (Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Clarence Fernandez)
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TABLE-Japan electricity cost estimate by power source
14 Dec 2011 02:36
TOKYO, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Following is the estimated cost of electricity by power source in Japan, compiled by a government panel this week.
The data will be taken into account when Japan decides its new energy policy next year following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant radiation disaster.
The panel, under the National Policy Unit, on Tuesday estimated that nuclear power would cost at least 8.9 yen (11 U.S. cents) per kilowatt hour (kwh) of electricity generated, up 51 percent or more from its last cost assessment of 5.9 yen in 2004.
The new estimate of 8.9 yen takes into account nearly 6 trillion yen of damages from a severe atomic accident like the Fukushima disaster, but the figure would rise to 10.2 yen if the costs from such an incident swelled to 20 trillion yen, the panel said.
The Japanese government is now leading debate on how to retreat from nuclear power in the long run while ensuring the safety of existing reactors.
Type 2004 2010 2030
Nuclear 5.9 at least 8.9 at least 8.9
Coal 5.7 9.5-9.7 10.8-11.0
Gas 6.2 10.7-11.1 10.9-11.4
Oil 16.5 36.0-37.6 38.9-41.9
Wind (Land) n/a 9.9-17.3 8.8-17.3
Wind (Offshore) n/a 9.4-23.1 8.6-23.1 Solar (household) n/a 33.4-38.3 9.9-20.0 Solar (mega solar) n/a 30.1-45.8 12.1-26.4 (Units: Yen per kwh) ($1 = 77.8450 Japanese yen) (Reporting by Osamu Tsukimori)
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