The caveat, however, is the plant, located on Japan’s the northeast coast, emains precarious more than a decade after three of the six reactors suffered meltdowns after an offshore earthquake of magnitude 9 triggered a series of powerful tsunamis which resulted in washed out back-up generators.
In their latest annual strategy report on progress at the plant, experts at the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Office (NDF) proposed the construction and filling with water of a massive concrete tank to completely enclose one of the reactor buildings.
That, in turn, would permit experts to deploy robots to more closely examine the condition of the reactor, as well as the fuel that has escaped and pooled in the building’s basement levels.
The plan was presented to the government at a meeting in early September.
“No radioactive materials would be swirling up underwater, so there would be almost zero impact on the outside,” NDF President Hajimu Yamana said in an Asahi newspaper report.
He said, however, the proposal was in the initial stages and no final decision had been taken. If it worked, however, then the same strategy could be deployed to help in the decommissioning of the remaining two damaged reactors at the facility.
Hajime Matsukubo, secretary-general of the Tokyo-based Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, remains a vocal critic of the Japanese government’s insistence on the need for atomic energy, but agreed the NDF plan appeared to offer a number of benefits for the decommissioning process.
“The work cannot go ahead without the water shield because it would expose workers to dangerously high levels of radiation so this idea for the construction of a tank around one of the reactors is positive,” he said in a published report.
Another concern that has been a constant since the March 2011 disaster is the possibility of another major earthquake or tsunami damaging the tank and potentially exposing radioactive debris to the air.
“We have already seen what long-term exposure to salt water at the site does to metal and other materials, and if there was another major tremor then that could very easily affect the tank and even see it collapse,” Matsukubo said. “To me, that is the biggest worry.”