The world has had other affairs since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan. Media outlets are devoting less and less space and time to the aftermath of the disaster. But employees of the Fukushima No. 1 Power Plant, government officials, the residents of Fukushima prefecture and volunteers are still struggling at the limits of human perseverance to contain the nuclear damage that came on top of a tragedy of destruction and death.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the Fukushima plant, is to announce this week the completion of the first-stage containment work with the installing of water decontamination and reactor cooling systems. It will enable the reduction of the size of the exclusion zone from the present radius of 30 kilometers and allow the return of many residents to their homes.
Dispatches from the crippled power plant tell stories of the impossible fight against the deadly radioactivity spewing from the inextinguishable nuclear fuel. In a container walled with lead to shield it from radiation, a heavy machinery operator controls a machine through a TV monitor to move irradiated rubble to a container, working for hours without a break. A crane operator is covered with a protection gear from head to foot, which means he cannot wipe away the sweat welling up all over his body in the scorching heat. As of last week, 31 people have been taken down with heatstroke.
The first-stage means the very first part of a long schedule which is to last for decades. The second stage of work until January 2012 is to achieve a “cold shutdown” of damaged reactors and significantly reduce radioactive contaminated water at the power plant. Yet, the ultimate removal of the fuel which melted down at the No. 1 reactor cannot begin for 10 years and the demolition of the power plant will take a few more decades, according to a government report unofficially made available to the Japanese media.
As hazy as the Fukushima plant disposal plan is Japan’s long-term vision on nuclear energy itself. Prime Minister Naoto Kan remarked on Wednesday last week that his country “should aim for a society that is not dependent on nuclear power generation,” looking toward eventually closing all the country’s 54 reactors. This meant an outright reversal from the pre-March 11 government plan to have nuclear power meet more than half of the total demand by 2030.
Two days later, however, Kan told Cabinet members that the policy outline he revealed on Wednesday was a “personal” one, not a government decision. Cabinet members complained that they were not consulted in advance and some warned against making a decision “hastily.” They are generally of the opinion that how to reduce dependence on nuclear energy should be studied within the wider context of energy policy.
As Japan grapples with the question of whether to abandon nuclear energy, Korea and other industrialized nations of the world face the same dilemma. Germany has promptly decided to phase out all its nuclear power plants. In the United States, a task force convened by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called for sweeping changes to shore up safety measures, but it concluded that a Fukushima-type accident was unlikely to occur in the U.S. and that continued nuclear plant activities “do not pose an imminent risk to public safety.”
Korea is closest to Japan geographically but people here believe that the Korean Peninsula is geologically stable and hence safe from any Fukushima-type disaster, as the U.S. NRC task force thought about their country. Then can we just go on with the current 30 percent dependence on nuclear power and move ahead with the plan to increase the rate to 40 percent within a decade, as if nothing happened?
Over the past four months, we witnessed an increase in the anti-nuclear, environmentalist activities at the nuclear waste storage facility site in Gyeongju and in the vicinities of nuclear power plants. But little is heard about how our energy and nuclear power authorities are struggling to decide on what to do with the 20 reactors in service. If no hasty decision is desired, they should at least convince us that their concern is not fading with time.
