It has all the challenges of Three Mile Island plus there are four damaged reactors not just one
The effort to contain the nuclear reactor crisis at Fukushima brings to mind the 1933 horror movie King Kong, in which a giant ape, escaped from captivity, and perched at the top of the Empire State Building, is fatally wounded by a swarm of war planes of the era.
While fictional film character Carl Denham intones his famous last line “It was beauty killed the beast,” a less prosaic New York sanitation department might have been wondering how to remove a giant dead gorilla carcass from the corner of 5th Ave. and 34th St. (King Kong image from Wikipedia)
Kong’s fall would have created a cleanup problem of immense scale. It would have been “beyond the design basis” of even the entire fleet of city garbage trucks.
Six gorillas at Fukushima
This dramatic movie metaphor is relevant as a visual image of the scope of the problem faced by Tokyo Electric Power Corp. (TEPCO) with the eventual decommissioning of six reactors at Fukushima. The utility doesn’t have just one dead giant gorilla, there are six. The first three nuclear reactors are likely to be found to be fatally compromised with heat damaged fuel assemblies from loss of cooling water. Partial melting of fuel may be part of the problem.
Massive hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off of secondary containment structures at reactors 1, 3, and 4. The fourth reactor is also likely severely damaged beyond repair. Its spent fuel pool is exposed to the open air as a result of one of the huge hydrogen explosions.
The fifth and sixth reactors, relatively undamaged, may never restart because of wrecked balance of plant infrastructure and ferocious public opposition which is leveraged by Japanese law that gives veto power over nuclear facilities to the provincial government.
BWR reactor schematic. Image from World Nuclear Association
The 15-meter high tsunami swept away the normal infrastructure of a nuclear power station which, along with rubble from the hydrogen explosions, put debris across access roads and rail sidings blocking delivery of emergency equipment.
Efforts to control leaks from buildings and trenches may go on for months or years. In short, it will be a very dangerous place to conduct cleanup work.
Read the full story exclusively at ANS Nuclear Cafe online now.
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