Excerpt
The Tokyo Electric Power Company laid out an ambitious plan on Sunday for bringing the reactors at its hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into a stable state known as cold shutdown within the next nine months and for trying to reduce the levels of radioactive materials being released in the meantime.
The blueprint for action represents Tokyo Electric’s most concrete timetable yet for controlling the reactors and improving safety at the plant, which was damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami nearly six weeks ago.
The first part of the plan (English text news release, opens in new page), expected to take three months, would include building new cooling systems, critical to preventing catastrophic releases of radioactive materials. The company then hopes to cover three badly damaged reactor buildings and install filters to reduce contamination being released into the air.
By announcing the construction of new cooling systems, the company implicitly acknowledged what outside experts had been warning for weeks: that the company’s earlier plan to repair the existing system was unlikely to work because the equipment was too badly damaged. The change in approach means that the country must resign itself to several more months of radioactive emissions — into the air and possibly into the Pacific — even though the plant appears to be less volatile than it was.
For weeks, workers have been consumed with reacting to a cascade of problems created not only by the original disasters but also by makeshift fixes for bringing the plant under control. By making its announcement on Sunday, Tokyo Electric was trying to show that conditions had apparently improved enough in recent days that it was now able to turn some of its attention to planning for the future.
I wish them all the good luck they can use.
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