Tepco's Damaged Reactors May Take 30 Years, $12 Billion to Scrap

[kristopher]

Tepco's Damaged Reactors May Take 30 Years, $12 Billion to Scrap
By Shigeru Sato, Yuji Okada and Tsuyoshi Inajima - Mar 30, 2011 12:20 AM ET

Damaged reactors at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant may take three decades to decommission and cost operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said.

Four of the plant’s six reactors became useless when sea water was used to cool them after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out generators running its cooling systems. The entire station north of Tokyo will likely be decommissioned, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said yesterday.

The damaged reactors need to be demolished after they have cooled and radioactive materials are removed and stored, said Tomoko Murakami, a nuclear researcher at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan. The process will take longer than the 12 years needed to decommission the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania following a partial meltdown, said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University.

“Lack of public support may force the decommissioning of all six reactors,” said Daniel Aldrich, a political science professor at Purdue University in Indiana. Tepco “will try to salvage two if it can find public support, which may be unlikely.” ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-30/tokyo-electric-s-damaged-reactors-may-take-30-years-12-billion-to-scrap.html

[Bonobo]

1. Scrapping them no matter what the cost is a good investment IMO. nt

[enough]

2. If they are saying 12 billion now, the final cost will be double or tripple. That's the way

the numbers always work out in the nuclear power industry.

But yes, the have to do it, of course.

[ComtesseDeSpair]

3. Perfect example of why the nuclear industry cannot be trusted...

Just the fact that they would even CONSIDER continuing to utilize two nuclear reactors near the ocean in a country prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, after a disaster has already befallen other reactors at the same plant, tells you all you ever need to know about the nuclear power industry. I love to point things like this out to Libertarian types who think that industry can regulate itself. As if.

[flamingdem]

4. How will the workers get to it if there's a exclusion zone anyway?

They are still in denial, their nuclear train is off the tracks.

[FBaggins]

5. "exclusion zone" means different things to different people

How large was the exclusion zone for Chernobyl?

Yet people worked at the other reactors on the site for a number of years.

[crickets]

7. Boggles the mind, doesn't it? -nt

[abqmufc]

6. And in 10 - 15 years most homes will have toasters made out of TEPCO scrap metal. n/t