Inside the Fukushima nuclear plant 12 years after catastrophic meltdown

Miles O'Brien Miles O'Brien

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Correction: A transcription error misidentified the Tokyo Electric Power Company. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.

Japan will soon begin the process of releasing radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean from the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant. As final preparations are being made, Science Correspondent Miles O'Brien has a rare look inside the facility.

Geoff Bennett:

Japan will soon begin the process of releasing radioactive water from the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.

As final preparations are being made, science correspondent Miles O'Brien got an exclusive look inside the facility.

Miles O’Brien:

Twelve years after the historic meltdowns, what was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains a complex, highly hazardous toxic waste site.

Upwards of 5,000 workers are here every day innovating and orchestrating the most complicated, expensive nuclear cleanup in history.

It's interesting to see it after seven years. It's changed quite a bit hasn't it?

Lake Barrett, TEPCO Adviser:

Yes. Well, a lot of things have happened here.

Miles O’Brien:

Yes, to say the least.

Lake Barrett:

A lot of progress.

Miles O’Brien:

And to say the least.

My guide for my seventh visit to Fukushima is nuclear engineer Lake Barrett. He led the cleanup for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979. He is now a paid consultant to the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO, which owns Fukushima and manages the decommissioning.

Lake Barrett:

So this is very similar, in my opinion, to sort of like putting a man on the moon.

Miles O’Brien:

Are there moonshot resources being applied to this?

Lake Barrett:

This is a multibillion-dollar-a-year effort being spent in Fukushima right now. It's going to take some time to complete this work.

Miles O’Brien:

Are you going to live to see it?

Lake Barrett:

Probably not.

Miles O’Brien:

We began our tour as close to the meltdowns as humans can dare.

So, the rusty steel frames of the structure…

Lake Barrett:

That's the original structure where it was blown off by the hydrogen explosion.

They have to build a steel structure all the way around. There will be hundreds of tons of steel, because it has to hold up 100-ton cranes to be able to dig down into inside the building eventually.

Miles O’Brien:

The ultimate goal here is to develop robotic technology to safely remove, contain and store the wreckage of the three nuclear reactors, piles of degraded concrete, melted steel and uranium, with all of its radioactive isotopes. The lava-like piles are called corium.

Not too far from us humans, can't be, and we're OK.

Lake Barrett:

Right. We can't go in there because the radiation levels are too hot.

Miles O’Brien:

Catching even a fleeting glimpse of the corium with robots is an extraordinary challenge. Intense radiation bombards the electronics with gamma rays, often rendering them useless.

And the path to robot ruin is a treacherous labyrinth. We don some protective gear on a mission to better grasp the embedded obstacles.

Lake Barrett:

We're inside the primary containment vessel.

Miles O’Brien:

We were inside Fukushima Daiichi unit number five. Unscathed by the disaster, the reactor is a near replica of the three that melted down.

Lake Barrett:

This is unit five. We're standing outside the pedestal that holds up the 400-ton reactor vessel.

Miles O’Brien:

It was like being a mouse inside an engine, a three-dimensional maze better suited for a contortionist.

So, where are we, Lake?

Lake Barrett:

We are underneath the unit five reactor vessel. These are the control rod drive mechanisms above us.

Miles O’Brien:

That's where the reactor is. In its sister units, this location is where the meltdowns got real.

Lake Barrett:

The reactor vessel with eight-inches thick steel, OK, it melted through the steel under high pressure. It ejected down here, almost like an explosive volcano, very high-temperature gases, around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Miles O’Brien:

Twenty feet below is a concrete floor between 10-and-14-feet-thick, a good thing, because that's where the corium piles now sit, underwater.

Lake Barrett:

Water is injected at the top of the reactor vessel, you know, 40 50 feet above us, and it trickles down through this fuel debris onto the floor.

Miles O’Brien:

This steady stream of contaminated water has created a sorcerer's apprentice-style problem here.

At first, they were generating between 130,000 and 160,000 gallons of radioactive water each and every day. In 2016, they completed a so-called ice wall, a $300 million subterranean perimeter of pipes cold enough to freeze the soil and keep much, but not all of the groundwater at bay. The site now generates tainted water at a daily rate of about 25,000 gallons.

Akira Ono leads the decontamination and decommissioning effort.

Akira Ono, TEPCO (through interpreter):

If you ask me if we can make it zero, I think it's not easy. Although the amount is less, water will continue to be contaminated.

Miles O’Brien:

All that water, now 340 million gallons of it and growing, sits cheek to jowl in a tank farm.

Lake Barrett and I walked through it.

Lake Barrett:

There's about almost 1,100 tanks here today.

Miles O’Brien:

So, if you left these tanks as they were, how long would it take before they would be not radioactive at all?

Lake Barrett:

Now, it depends on how low is low. To be drinkable, it's going to be many, many decades, 100 years or so. But that's not really plausible at this stage.

Miles O’Brien:

You can't keep building tanks here?

Lake Barrett:

There's no room.

Miles O’Brien:

TEPCO says it needs to make room to build structures designed to safely contain debris that will be radioactive for centuries.

Akira Ono (through interpreter):

We have to build a variety of facilities for smooth decommissioning going forward. It is essential to start emptying and disposing of the tanks at the stage where we are now to secure vacant lots.

Miles O’Brien:

Before the water is tanked, it flows through a series of sophisticated treatment facilities designed to remove about 100 radioactive isotopes.

To visit the largest treatment facility, we had to add even more protective clothing. If one of these pressurized pipes sprung a leak, our radioactive contamination risk would be very high.

Lake Barrett:

This is called the advanced liquid processing plant.

Miles O’Brien:

These facilities can collectively process about 300,000 gallons of water each day.

Lake Barrett:

It's a chemical process, not a nuclear process. So it's like an ion-exchange resin in a home water softener.

Miles O’Brien:

I like that analogy, a giant home water softener.

Lake Barrett:

In chemistry terms, that's what it is for specific ions. Normally, at home, it's iron you want to take out. This is taking out other isotopes as well.

Miles O’Brien:

He says it removes 99.9999 percent of the radionuclides, trace levels, with one exception, an isotope called tritium.

Lake Barrett:

So, chemically, it's water. So it doesn't remove it at all, so it doesn't change the tritium at all in the system.

Miles O’Brien:

Tritium is a mildly radioactive form of hydrogen that occurs naturally. It is luminescent, used to light watch dials, aircraft gauges and exit signs.

It reacts with oxygen just like regular hydrogen, creating water that is radioactive, so-called tritiated water.

Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute:

Removing tritium itself is very expensive and very hard to do on this scale. It's never been done before.

Miles O’Brien:

Marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Ken Buesseler:

Ultimately, you can't just keep collecting more and more water. What's being considered also is releasing some of this water back to the ocean.

Miles O’Brien:

Every nuclear power plant in the world routinely discharges tritium. And now TEPCO and the Japanese government are planning to do the same here.

This has triggered a chain reaction of anger and concern from fishermen nearby and other countries throughout the region. More on that when we continue our series.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Miles O'Brien in Futaba, Japan.

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Miles O'Brien Miles O'Brien

Miles O’Brien is a veteran, independent journalist who focuses on science, technology and aerospace.