More than four months after it was crippled by an earthquake-generated tsunami, Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has stabilized and workers are on track for achieving a cold shutdown within six months, government and utility officials say.
Officials made a positive prognosis this week after scaling several hurdles in decommissioning the facility, which was damaged March 11 when a tsunami disabled the plant's cooling system. The flooding led to partial meltdowns of the reactors that released radioactivity in the atmosphere and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents.
In recent weeks, engineers have established an improvised cooling system to circulate water through the damaged reactors. They have also set up a system to decontaminate radioactive water from the process. Nitrogen injections at the four damaged reactors are helping to prevent more explosions, officials said this week.
But officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the plant, warn that even if a cold shutdown – when the reactor cores no longer burn off coolant water – is reached by early 2012, the final cleanup could take a decade or more. The plant will eventually be encased in concrete as a safety precaution.
"We still don't have a schedule for the work to decommission this plant, and that's planning that we have to do right now," Goshi Hosono, the minister handling the central government's response to the crisis, told reporters in Tokyo on Tuesday.
