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

[denem]

Damn lying leftist alarmists:

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

Money News Wednesday, 30 Mar 2011

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.moneynews.com/Markets/Tepco-Reactors-30Years-12Billion/2011/03/30/id/391102

[DCKit]

1. A bargain, at that price.

Unfortunately, everything nuclear always costs (at least) 3x what they say it will, initially. In this case, I'm thinking it'll top $100 billion for clean-up and containment.

On the bright side, I'm also imagining all the incredible, radiation-proof machines and robots the Japanese are going to develop for this task. It'll be great to have them available when the same kind of accident happens here.