What to do with Fukushima Water? Ghost Ships, and the Cat that Came Back to Bite us… April 3, 2011

Swamped by the volumes of now-radioactive water that must be removed from the damaged reactors at Fukushima, Japanese authorities are now considering anchoring tankers nearby to take on the tainted slurry. No word on what to do with the tankers after that…

The Japan Times reports:

The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. have been struggling for three weeks to end the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear crisis but are being stymied by the need to remove massive amounts of highly radioactive water. The highest priority is to extract the contaminated water in the flooded basements of some of the reactor turbine buildings, whose electric systems must be checked in order to cool fuel rods inside the reactors and spent fuel pools.

While the government has mulled anchoring tankers by the plant to store the water and building a facility to properly dispose of it, the city of Shizuoka announced Friday it will provide its mega-float, a huge barge, to Tepco for storing the water. — Misawa said it is highly possible the No. 2 reactor’s pressure vessel is damaged, since the water in its turbine building is extremely contaminated, showing surface-level radiation in excess of 1,000 millisieverts per hour. Radionuclide analysis of that water showed it contains not only volatile iodine-131 and cesium-134, but also the more stable lanthanum-140 and barium-140. All four substances are believed to have come from atomic fission, meaning “some part of the pressure vessel is probably damaged,” Misawa said.

In the classic, “Cat in the Hat Comes Back”, the magical cat’s efforts to clean up a nasty stain keep backfiring, as he goes from trying “Little Cat’s A, B, C” and so on. Until finally, Little Cat Z produces “Voom”. Unfortunately, as the Cat explains,

The engineers who designed the systems of Mark 1 boiling water reactors were brilliant men.

But they did not give us Voom.

Now the Japanese are furiously pulling one hat after another, in an unending effort to find that final cat with the answer.