Japan Says Decommissioning Damaged Reactors Could Take 40 Years

TOKYO ? Decommissioning the wrecked reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will take 40 years and require the use of robots to remove melted fuel that appears to be stuck to the bottom of the reactors? containment vessels, the Japanese government said on Wednesday.

The predictions were contained in a detailed roadmap for fully shutting down the three reactors, which suffered meltdowns after an earthquake and tsunami struck the plant on March 11. The government had previously predicted it would take 30 years to clean up after the accident at Fukushima, the world?s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The nuclear crisis minister, Goshi Hosono, acknowledged that no country has ever had to clean up three destroyed reactors at the same time. Mr. Hosono told reporters the decommissioning faced challenges that were not totally predictable, but ?we must do it even though we may face difficulties along the way.?

The plan?s release follows last week?s declaration by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda that the plant had been put into the equivalent of a ?cold shutdown,? a stable state that suggested the runaway reactors had finally been brought under control. Critics, however, immediately challenged that statement, saying it was impossible to call the reactors stable when their fuel had melted through the inner containment vessels, and appeared to be attached to the concrete bottom of outer containment vessels.

Still, the government appears ready to move ahead with the next stage of the cleanup. According to Wednesday?s roadmap, the plant?s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, will spend the next two years removing spent fuel rods from storage pools located in the same buildings as the damaged reactors. At least one of those pools, which are highly radioactive, was exposed by hydrogen explosions that destroyed the reactor buildings in the first days of the accident.

The most technically challenging step will be removing the melted fuel, a process that the government said will take 25 years and require new types of robots and other new technologies that have not even been developed yet. After the removal, fully decommissioning the reactors will take another 5 to 10 years, according to the roadmap.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9da97a693afdba6a7218459733da5e0c

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