(1)
How Do You Clean Up After a Nuclear Disaster?
by Gretchen Gavett
Frontline (PBS)
February 28, 2012
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-technology/japans-nuclear-meltdown/how-do-you-clean-up-after-a-nuclear-disaster/	

The events last March in Japan couldn't have presented
Japan with a more difficult task. After record-setting
earthquake, a massive tsunami and a nuclear disaster
comparable in scale only to the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown,
how do you wrap your head around making once-vibrant
villages habitable again? Where do you even begin? 

The Exclusion Zone

Currently, there's a 20 km (12 mile) exclusion zone
around Fukushima Daiichi. No one is allowed to live
inside it, and workers are bused in at all hours of the
day and night to work at the plant. The goal is for the
80,000 or so residents forced to evacuate to eventually
be able to return.

Decontamination has never been done on such a large
scale before. The only other nuclear accident to be
rated a 7, the highest on the international scale, was
Chernobyl in 1986 in Ukraine. In that case, the decision
was made to evacuate the area - about 20 miles
surrounding the plant - permanently. A protective
sarcophagus was built around the plant, which is
currently being updated because the original is
crumbling.

What Needs to Be Done

First you have to stabilize the nuclear reactors while
limiting the release of radioactive materials. In part
this requires keeping the nuclear fuel cool, until
temperatures in the reactors reach 100 degress Celsius
or below - a point known as "cold shutdown." Three
reactors at Fukushima Daiichi reached this mark last
December, though because of leaks, a half-million liters
of water is still being pumped in each day.

Because of the initial flooding after the tsunami, and
the gallons and gallons of water injected into the the
reactors, there was - and likely still is - radioactive
water in the reactors. A lot of it. "In the case of
Three Mile Island [in Pennsylvania], we had about half a
million gallons of very highly radioactive water in the
basement of the containment building," Lake Barrett, a
nuclear engineer who coordinated the cleanup at Three
Mile Island, told NPR. "It was about 10 feet deep.
They're facing the same situation in Fukushima, but they
have three of these cores that have severe damage to
them, so they probably have tens of millions of gallons
of the same highly radioactive water that they're
dealing with."

A few weeks after the earthquake and tsunami, for
example, radiation levels in the water in the basement
of reactor 2 were measured at 1,000 millisieverts per
hour. Nuclear workers aren't allowed doses over 20
millisieverts a year; 1,000 can result in radiation
sickness and nausea. [For more on measuring radiation,
here's The Guardian's handy cheat-sheet.] A recent video
taken by TEPCO of the inside of reactor 2 did not reveal
the amount of radioactive water in the containment
vessel, though it did detect corroded piping and
dripping humidity.

Then there are the reactor cores, where the generation
of nuclear energy happens. It five years before workers
at Three Mile Island even got a glimpse of the core at
the damaged reactor; 30 percent of it had melted. It
will likely be even more difficult and time-consuming at
Fukushima Daiichi given the number of reactors and the
extensive damage to each.

Dirt and vegetation are also issues for the clean-up: In
order to cut radioactivity in half over the next two
years, about 4 centimeters of topsoil needs to be
removed from farms around Fukushima prefecture. In
total, it's enough soil to fill 20 football stadiums.
It's estimated that radioactive waste in Fukushima city
alone could fill 10 baseball stadiums.

Radiation particles can be sticky - meaning they're
tough to get rid of.  This means that trees, grass,
plants and soil need to be removed and disposed of
entirely. Because of this, cleanup work can resemble
ordinary yard work, aside from the protective suits and
masks.

Who's Doing the Work?

There really aren't experts in the field of nuclear
decontamination. Japan's government recently handed out
$13 billion in contracts (some of which went to the same
companies that built the country's nuclear power plants)
to begin cleaning and to find best practices.

The actual cleaning, however, is "being carried out by
numerous subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who in
turn rely on untrained casual laborers to do the
dirtiest contamination work."

Some of these "casual laborers" - sometimes known as
nuclear gypsies - work directly inside the crippled
plant. Salaries can range from $80 to $500 a day, though
some have reported higher offerings, and most
contractors work two hours a day because of
radioactivity. (This does not include the time spent
being transported to the plant, clothed in protective
gear, etc.)

This two-tiered system - company executives and
engineers on the top, with contract employees on the
bottom - is common in Japan's nuclear industry, dating
back to the 1970s. Physics professor Yuko Fujita
described it as "the hidden world of nuclear power" to
The New York Times; in 2010, for example, 88 percent of
workers at Japan's 18 nuclear plants were contractors.

In the month following the earthquake and tsunami, TEPCO
reported that 45 of the 300 workers at the Fukushima
Daichii plant were contractors. By July, the plant had
almost 3,000 workers - and only 373 were TEPCO
employees.

Many of these workers are exposed to radiation levels
that are much higher than the top-tier employees. The
Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, a watchdog group
in Japan, found that contractors received 96 percent of
the harmful radiation among plant workers in the
country. In addition, the temporary employees were
exposed to radiation at rates 16 percent higher than
TEPCO employees.

These workers often don't have health insurance,
pensions or other similar benefits.

In addition to TEPCO workers and contractors, some
community groups outside the exclusion zone have shunned
the government cleanup process in favor of organizing
local cleanups themselves.

And then there are the robots. Removing the fuel that's
melted inside the reactors is particularly challenging
and dangerous. The government has said this will require
robots and other types of technology that don't yet
exist. The hope is to have the robots ready by 2013.

The Cost

"Even if Japan's nuclear crisis is contained, its
earthquake and tsunami now seem certain to be,
economically speaking, among the worst national
disasters in history, with total losses potentially as
high as two hundred billion dollars," wrote The New
Yorker's James Surowiecki just weeks after the disaster.
Another estimate right after the disaster placed the
cost closer to 25 trillion yen, or $300 billion - four
times the cost of cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina.
In addition, containing and cleaning any radioactive
material could cost $10 billion alone.

TEPCO is dealing with its own financial woes. Once on
the verge of bankruptcy, the government recently
received a government bailout that has the potential to
reach $137 billion.

There are also accusations that companies are taking
advantage of government contracts for decontamination
work. "It's a scam," Kiyoshi Sakurai, a critic of
Nuclear power, told The New York Times. "Decontamination
is becoming big business."

By comparison, the Three Mile Island cleanup cost almost
$1 billion. Belarus estimates the total cost of
resettlement, cleaning and sealing the Chernobyl
reactor, and fulfilling medical claims to be $235
billion.

How Long Will It Take?

Last November, Japan's Atomic Energy Commission released
its draft report, recommending a timeline that includes
removing fuel rods from the reactors within 10 years and
spent fuel within three. (By comparison, the fuel rods
started to be removed from the damaged Three Mile Island
reactor six years after the meltdown in 1979.) The
report estimated the full clean-up will take 30 t 40
years.

Removing fuel that has melted in the Fukushima Daichii
reactors will likely take 25 years. Decommissioning the
plant will add another five to 10 years to this process.
By comparison, decontaminating after the Three Mile
Island accident in 1979 took 14 years.

The Storage Problem

Where do you put radioactive materials, ranging from
spent fuel rods to contaminated vegetation to the
480,000 protective suits worn by workers? Japan's
government is currently working to establish long-term
storage facilities, which will last about 30 years, but
it estimates that their construction will take at least
three more years. In the meantime, individual
communities outside the exclusion zone are left with the
task of storing radioactive waste.

Some experts are concerned about the tactics some are
using. For example, some schools are putting
contaminated soil in holes lined with plastic. The
problem? Radioactive materials can leak through plastic.

Much of the nuclear waste from Three Mile Island was
shipped to Idaho to be stored at the Department of
Energy's National Engineering Laboratory.

(2)
Fukushima, A Year On: 3,000 Workers Take on the 
Twisted Steel and Radiation
Justin McCurry (in Fukushima)
guardian.co.uk, 
28 February 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/28/fukushima-workers-twisted-steel-radiation

Out in the evacuation zone, cars lie abandoned and 
groceries sit untouched - but the mangled nuclear plant 
is alive with activity

The remains of the shattered reactors are still some
distance away when you first notice the sheer
destruction of Japan's nuclear disaster. The journey
into the heart of the world's worst nuclear crisis since
Chernobyl 26 years ago begins much earlier, in the towns
and villages that exist in name only, their residents
having been sent fleeing a year ago.

Homes and shops lie empty, the roads are deserted. In
the town of Naraha, groceries sit untouched on the
shelves of a convenience store; a handful of cars
punctuate a supermarket carpark, abandoned by their
owners amid the panic that followed the first explosion
at one of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's reactor
buildings.

Most of the buildings that lie just inside the 12-mile
(20km) nuclear evacuation zone - even the grand wooden
homes - withstood the violent seismic shifts unleashed
by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake on the afternoon of 11
March. But, as the Guardian witnessed on a rare trip to
the nuclear plant, the destruction is more insidious
than collapsed roofs and ruptured tarmac, but no less
shocking. Almost everywhere, beeping monitors alert
visitors to the invisible foe that has befouled entire
communities: radiation.

Further into the evacuation zone, near a disused public
relations office belonging to the plant's owner, Tokyo
Electric Power (Tepco), radiation levels rise to 2
microsieverts/hour (the normal background level is
0.2-0.3). The readings soar to 35 microsieverts/hour in
Okuma, a town near the plant's perimeter, where
residents have been told their former homes could remain
uninhabitable for decades.

Fukushima Daiichi covers a huge swath of land stretching
from its hilltop entrance down to the coast, where its
six reactors were easy targets for the 14-metre tsunami
that roared ashore soon after the quake. From a vantage
point to the south of the site it is easy to see the
mangled innards of reactor buildings No 3 and 4 and,
behind them, the vinyl shroud covering the No 1 reactor
- the first unit to suffer a hydrogen explosion last
March.

There are few signs of the 3,000 workers on site - a
small portion of the many thousands of contractors and
subcontractors who have joined the mission to save the
plant from an even greater catastrophe. Pockets of
workers in protective suits huddle around coiled pipes
and hoses used to feed and recycle coolant to the
damaged reactors. In the distance are rows of tanks
containing tens of thousands of tonnes of radioactive
water drawn from the reactors' flooded basements.

While temperatures inside the reactors have stayed below
the required boiling point, radiation is still too high
for workers to enter some areas. The utility's
contamination map shows radiation inside reactor No 3 as
high as 1,500 microsieverts/hour.

The world is in awe of the speed with which Japan has
cleared tsunami rubble from other stretches of its
north-east coast. But along the Fukushima Daiichi
waterfront, the removal of debris deposited by the waves
never really began.

The seawall, which failed to hold back the ocean on 11
March, is no more. Instead, piles of mesh sacks filled
with rocks are all that separate the water from the
exposed bowels of the reactors' turbine buildings, now a
mass of twisted metal, shutters and ladders, where
upended trucks sit in ditches filled with wreckage.

Work in this area of the plant is all but impossible.
"Most of the workers here perform a two-hour shift in
the morning and again in the afternoon," says Katsuhiko
Iwaki, deputy manager of the Fukushima Daiichi
stabilisation centre. "But there are areas where the
dosages are so high they can only stay for two or three
minutes . just enough time to connect a hose before
their alarms signal it's time to leave."

Elsewhere, almost every spare patch of ground is covered
in pipes and hoses, and sheets of wood and steel.

Avert your gaze from the gaping holes in the reactor
walls and you could have stumbled upon an unwieldy
building site. Only the mission here is not to rebuild,
but to dismantle.

The success of the operation to remove melted nuclear
fuel from the reactors - a process that will not start
for 10 years - will depend on the hundreds of Tepco
staff hunkered over computer screens in the plant's
emergency control room. Voices rarely rise above a
murmur as experts analyse data, while two large screens
on a wall link the room, where the air is filtered, to
the situation outside and Tepco's headquarters in Tokyo.

Takeshi Takahashi took over as plant manager in December
after his predecessor was diagnosed with cancer (which
is unrelated to the disaster). "We need to avoid major
releases of radioactive materials of the kind we saw
after the accident," he says. "We achieved cold shutdown
in December, but we must ensure we keep making
improvements because we still can't say for sure the
facilities on site are totally trouble-free."

He refused to speculate on who was to blame for the
accident before the government had completed its
investigation, but he accepted criticism of his
employer's transparency in the early days of the crisis.
"We often hear we didn't communicate properly, and I
apologise for that," he says. "It was never our
intention to suppress information, but there was a
chaotic time after the accident when we tended to
neglect efficient communication."

Tepco appears to have adjusted its post-disaster mantra,
at least in public. Last year its priority was to
stabilise the reactors and prove the plant's destiny was
back in the hands of its operator. The utility has since
shifted its focus to the tens of thousands of relocated
residents.

"I would like to apologise for the trouble we have
caused local people," Takahashi says, unprompted. "We're
doing our best to make it possible for evacuees to
return home as soon as possible, but we have to put
their safety first."

But no one can say when, or if, the stirrings of civic
life will be seen in the deserted communities around
Fukushima Daiichi. And amid the opprobrium directed at
Tepco's corporate culture, it is easy to forget the
victims include men, and a small number of women, who
are witnessing the recovery effort from the inside.

Saori Kanesaki, who once guided visitors around
Fukushima Daiichi, is one of 16,000 residents of Tomioka
who were driven from their homes last March. "Before the
accident it was my job to tell visitors that nuclear
power was safe," says Kanesaki, who now works at the
plant for a Tepco affiliate.

"But given the situation, if I were to tell them that
now . I would be lying."

___________________________________________

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