Super-Cool Plan To Save Japan From Radiation

Fukushima nuclear plant gets icy treatment

WND

STEVE ELWART

A construction project is being launched at Japan’s imploded Fukushima nuclear power plant, which melted down after an offshore undersea earthquake and the resulting tsunami three years ago, to try to limit the release of immense amounts of radiation.

Officials already had announced plans for a $300 million project to build an almost mile-long subterranean ice wall around the complex, which is hoped to have the effect of halting the drainage of contaminated water from the plant site.

Construction is scheduled by Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Japanese utility that owns the failed site, to begin on the complicated system within days.

It was September of last year when Japanese government released plans for an underground wall based on technology first tested in the 1990s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with encouraging results.

Joe Sopko, executive vice president of Moretrench, a Rockaway, N.J., based contractor specializing in frozen-earth projects, is convinced it’s certainly possible. As he told The Atlantic, “This is not a complicated freeze job. It really isn’t. However, the installation, because of the radiation, is.”

“It’s just sometimes it’s the only scenario that will really work,” said Sopko. “When nothing else will work, it just jumps out at you and says ‘Wow, it’s a freeze job.’”

To build the wall, 1,073 pipes will be sunk about three feet apart into the ground to a water-proof rock layer (a depth of about 90 feet). The pipes will then be filled with brine (concentrated salt water) and circulated through the pipes. Using 14 400 kW refrigerating units, the brine will be cooled to -40 degrees Fahrenheit, which will freeze the ground around the pipes.

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Reposted with permission