Plans are already underway to decommission the tsunami-swamped Fukushima plant.
Hydrogen explosions. High levels of radiation. Thousands of gallons of contaminated water dumped into the sea. With the drumbeat of bad news, including another powerful aftershock on Thursday, it will take months, if not years, to stabilise the reactors and spent fuel pools that were damaged in last month’s earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant.
Yet it is not too soon for a team of engineers from Japan and the United States to begin working on the thorny task of how to dismantle the reactors, four of which are so badly damaged that the plant’s operator has said they will be scrapped.
Already, dozens of engineers from Toshiba – which helped build four of the plant’s reactors – have been joined by experts from the United States to prepare for the decommissioning work, a job so big that the planning needs to start now, in parallel with the efforts to contain the crisis.
The team includes experts from Westinghouse, whose majority owner is Toshiba; Shaw Power Group, a civil engineering firm; and the Babcock & Wilcox Company, an energy technology and services company, one of whose specialties is the disposal of hazardous materials.
The plans to take apart the reactors are complicated not only by the volatility of the situation but also by the uncertainty about the reactors’ condition once they finally cool. No one has ever decommissioned four damaged reactors at one power plant, let alone reactors rocked by a powerful earthquake and then swamped by a tsunami.
In fact, no Japanese nuclear power plant has ever been entirely decommissioned, which is one reason Westinghouse and Babcock & Wilcox – companies that helped shut down the damaged reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania after the accident there in 1979 – have joined the effort.
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