Chapter 13

THE ROAD AHEAD

The Sarcophagus was never intended as a permanent solution. Rather, the concern at the time was to erect a structure to confine the radioactive release as rapidly as possible. As a consequence, it only had an estimated life of around 20 years - a time frame long since expired. In 1997, a Shelter Implementation Plan funded by 46 countries and organisations for a replacement - dubbed the New Safe Confinement (NSC) - was set in motion, with an estimated cost of €2 billion. Construction finally began in 2011, around the time I visited the area. The NSC, an enormous, one-of-a-kind arch, 250 meters wide by 165m long, and weighing a colossal 30,000 tons, is being assembled from prefabricated sections at a special holding ground 400m west of Unit 4. The first half was completed at the end of March 2014. Both halves were joined together a year later, and all the external skin has been attached and internal work is progressing well as of April 2016. Though it was originally supposed to be in place over the Sarcophagus by 2005, funds were difficult to come by and the NSC is still being built as of early 2016. It’s expected to be finished before the end of this year. Upon completion, the entire arch will be slid along purpose-built tracks over the existing Sarcophagus, a process that will take about two days. It will be the largest movable structure ever built. Unlike the original Object Shelter, this new confinement is designed to last 100 years, by which time most decommissioning work on Unit 4 should have concluded.

Each half of the arch is made from several sections. Enormous jacks, whose only prior job was raising the sunken Kursk submarine in 2001, were used to lift each stage higher and higher until it reached its full height of 110 meters. Inside are remotely-operated heavy-duty overhead cranes, to be used for moving people and equipment.

To avoid corrosion of the steel structure, the designers have implemented a clever air-conditioning system that circles 45,000m³ of warm air per-hour within the vicinity of the shelter’s cladding. “There are steel structures that have lasted 100 years, such as the Eiffel Tower, but they last because they’re continually repainted,” said Dr Eric Schmieman, a senior technical advisor from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the US, to Wired magazine in 2013. “We’re not able to do that once we slide this into place - the radiation levels are so high we can’t send people in. So what are we going to do? We are going to condition the air that goes into that space. We’re going to keep the relative humidity in there at less than 40 percent.293”

When everything is in place, engineers will begin dismantling the Sarcophagus - estimated to take five years. Assuming that’s completed before 2023, when the Designed Steel Stabilisation Structure holding up the western wall is no longer guaranteed to take the weight, work can begin on removing fuel-containing material from within Unit 4. They’ll have 100 years, which sounds like a lot, but nuclear decommissioning is a notoriously laborious process. Despite the fire at England’s Windscale nuclear plant happening all the way back in 1957, clean-up work isn’t expected to finish until 2041.

Originally supposed to be in place on top of the Sarcophagus by 2005, funds were difficult to come by and the NSC is still being built as of early 2016. It’s expected to be completed before the end of this year.

As for Fukushima, it is very much a man-made disaster - one with a post-accident story almost as interesting as Chernobyl’s. Unfortunately, this is mainly because of how inept the clean-up operating has been. Every week for the first few post-tsunami years, new reports emerged of fresh leaks of radioactive water, decommission workers being exposed to high doses, inadequate equipment and safety precautions that would be considered laughable if they weren’t endangering people’s lives - not to mention the environment. They have even repeated the most frustrating error to occur in 1986: using radiometers that go off the scale and assuming the radiation levels are at the device’s maximum rated measurement. Even more unbelievable, the clean-up operation has now become infamous for using unskilled homeless men and women, tempted off the streets by corrupt subcontractors who are often a barely-legal face for organised crime. These poor people work and live under horrifying conditions and have upwards of one-third of their money skimmed off wages by the same subcontractors who hired them.294 Unlike the Chernobyl clean-up, where the Soviet Government threw men and money at the problem until it was buried, Fukushima’s owner/operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is a public company (though effectively nationalised in 2012 with a massive government bailout), with profits to make and investors to please. As such, it has spent as little money as it can reasonably get away with whilst giving the appearance of trying to resolve the problem.

In October 2013, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended a two-year period of stubbornly refusing international help, when he asked the world’s nuclear experts for assistance in the clean-up. Mere weeks later, it was revealed that the Japanese Government had become so frustrated with TEPCO that it drafted a proposal to strip the company of its responsibility for the plant. At the beginning of November of the same year, already battling low morale, Fukushima plant operators began the most dangerous and delicate phase of decommissioning up to that point: removing highly radioactive spent fuel from Reactor 4’s cooling pool. Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority chief personally advised TEPCO’s president Yoshimi Hitosugi to proceed with the utmost caution, but when asked for his thoughts on the matter, Hitosugi was blasé, insisting, “we believe it’s not dangerous.”

By March 2015, TEPCO had wasted more than a third of the $1.6 billion of taxpayer money allocated for cleaning up the plant in a catalogue of failures. A drastic plan to seal Fukushima Daiichi off from the surrounding earth, to stop contaminated water from leaking into the sea, was approved and the required machinery built. The joint TEPCO and government effort involves freezing the ground using 1568 pipes in a colossal wall 30 meters deep. Critics of the plan pointed out that cost and feasibility issues were not properly thought through, but the government pushed ahead with it anyway. An initial attempt to freeze the earth ended in embarrassing failure in 2014 when TEPCO couldn’t get the temperature as low as required, even after adding ten tons of ice into the mix. Freezing was expected resume in March 2016 - the original anticipated completion date - and will last 7 to 8 months if all goes according to plan.295

The biggest waste was a $270 million machine custom-built to extract radioactive caesium from water leaking out of Fukushima’s three damaged reactors and into the ocean. The machine never worked properly and only filtered a total of 77,000 tons of water, instead of the 300,000 it was intended to process every day before it was abandoned. The leaking storage tanks mentioned above somehow cost $135 million, all of which are being replaced.296

Nuclear power had been experiencing something of a renaissance before the Fukushima disaster, with the world appearing to finally move on from Chernobyl. A fresh emergency brought old fears back to the surface, causing many countries to review their nuclear policies. For their part, Japan immediately shut down all 48 of its remaining nuclear reactors after the accident in 2011, and only recently began reactivating a select few. Germany, another major user of nuclear energy, followed suit and began decommissioning all of its plants, with Sweden, Spain and Italy each doing the same. Even France, famous for relying on nuclear power for about 75% of its electricity, appears to be shying away from atomic energy. The Obama Administration had encouraged construction of the first new US nuclear plants in decades, but these projects are already running over-budget and over-schedule. New technologies which could potentially change the tide, such as reactors using molten salt, are expensive and unproven on a commercial scale, with probable disadvantages often outweighing the theoretical advantages, while many existing reactors are getting near the end of their intended lifespan and will soon be shut down forever. The nuclear industry - vital, yet feared and misunderstood - faces an uncertain future.

It isn’t all bad, however. Even the staunchest opponents of nuclear power - the environmentalists - are now concluding in droves that it could be our only option for scalable, sustainable, clean energy, while India, South Korea, Russia and especially China are building over 60 new nuclear power stations between them. Exciting new technologies are being developed in India, where the world’s first prototype commercial thorium reactor (which uses fission of uranium233, produced from the natural element thorium) should be built by 2017. It can operate for four months without any human control and has been designed to last 100 years - triple the usual lifespan. Thoughts turned to tsunami-proof power stations after Fukushima, and now a team of nuclear engineers from MIT are working on a sea-worthy, floating reactor, which uses flooded compartments as an infinite supply of coolant. Competing renewable energy technologies like wind and solar are improving all the time, and may be a viable alternative to coal, oil and nuclear fuels in a few decades, but for the time being nuclear power seems like our only realistic chance of creating clean energy on a global scale. Let’s hope that those with the power and money to build and run them have learned to put safety first.