Japan: "Chernobyl solution"

[madmax]

"If cooling fails, Japan may bury reactor"

"JAPAN appears to be considering a "Chernobyl solution" to end its nuclear crisis as emergency crews, technicians and a growing army of international experts struggle to bring Fukushima's reactors and spent fuel rods under control.
But while the Tokyo Electric Power Co said the option was "not an impossibility", cooling the reactors was the priority.

As seawater was hosed through blast holes in the reactor walls, engineers said burying the Fukushima complex in concrete and sand was an absolute last resort.

That strategy, which was used when the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986, would represent a worst-case conclusion to the nuclear crisis, and leave an area just 240km north of Tokyo effectively off-limits for decades.

It is not known whether the combined effects of the earthquake, tsunami and hydrogen explosions have left the pumps able to perform the vital task of cooling the most threatened part of the plant -- the third reactor, with its dangerously low pool of water and its "dirty bomb" viscera of radioactive fuel."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/if-cooling-fails-japan-may-bury-reactor/story-fn84naht-1226025038550

[godai]

1. "If cooling fails" n/t

[GodlessBiker]

2. What if they do that and there is another large earthquake and tsunami?

[Junkdrawer]

3. Buried reactors tell no tales...

Of course that's how it ends.

[Shagbark Hickory]

4. I don't understand how nukes can be so cost effective if the eventuality that something goes wrong

happens, it ends up costing billions of dollars between the damage to agriculture, evacuations, repairs, all kinds of specialists being brought in from all over the world, health costs from all the cancer.

It really isn't cost effective. For this kind of money you could figure a way to have windmills suspended in the air.

[madmax]

5. Oh don't bother your beautiful mind with such

trivia. And don't even entertain logic and common sense, they are never considered.

Sen.Lamar Alexander(R)TN was on CNN the other day calling for 100 more nuclear reactors in the US. I have a suggestion.

There are 100 US Senators, build every new reactor within 25 miles of their home and I'll be on board. :sarcasm:

[Celebration]

6. I understand it

They don't place any possibility of catastrophic failure into their cost models. :crazy:

[malaise]

7. It's cost effective for the owners of the nukes n/t

[Junkdrawer]

8. Google "Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act".

Uncle Sam eats those costs.