"Tunnel vision: Plan to put Fukushima on ice hits snag"
June 17, 2014 As reported by RT, TEPCO's plan to freeze 11,000 tons (nearly 3 million U.S. gallons) of highly radioactively contaminated water, in tunnels beneath the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has not gone well.
The contaminated water has been there since April 2011 -- it had piled up in the first weeks of the nuclear catastrophe, during the desperate efforts to stop the triple reactor core meltdowns at Units 1, 2, and 3.
Efforts to freeze the contaminated water under Unit 2 began in April of this year. TEPCO suspects that coolant flow is being blocked, so intends to add more pipes for injecting the freezing chemicals.
As TEPCO itself pointed out on June 18th, the project to freeze the contaminated water in the tunnels is distinct from its project to create an "ice wall" in the ground around the entirety of the wrecked nuclear power plant. The "ice wall," stretching 1.5 km on a side, would be intended to freeze the ground, and force groundwater around the sides of the radioactively contaminated area.
As RT reports, even if the unprecedented, expensive (a third of a billion dollars) "ice wall" project works as intended, it would merely decrease the current 400 tons (108,000 U.S. gallons) per day of radioactive water piling up at the plant, by 100 tons (27,000 gallons) per day, to 300 tons (nearly 81,000 U.S. gallons) per day still needing to be stored.