Given the damage is already done, why not leave it in place? Encase it in concrete and come back in a decade or two when the worst products have decayed?
Remove high level waste to a more stable environment is the first step in reducing those ongoing costs.
> Better understanding the melted fuel debris from inside the reactors is key to their decommissioning
It's not exactly clear to me how this benefits decommissioning either, but that's all I got from the article.
It isn’t the type of problem amenable to just bulldozing it into a hole, unless you’re Russian anyway.
It seems to me the fix would be to not have your backup generators below the water line.
Yes, I'm serious. TEPCO wanted to dump sea water into the reactors as a last resort so they wouldn't melt down, but the Japanese government at the time didn't allow it because the reactors would be rendered unusable.
Of course, the reactors melted down and became unusable anyway.
Fukushima #1 was a human failure and the only solution to that is a human solution. Any engineering solution will be foiled by a bigger human failure, as the saying goes.
We need to be fair here: Plans for potential flooding were made, the issue was nobody expected a tsunami that fucking tall and reasonably so.
Guidelines and such have been updated since so it (hopefully) won't happen again, but you can't fault engineers of the past for working with the data they had and coming to the conclusions they did.
that's less reasonable when you consider Japan's history with tsunami.
The events in 1933,1896, and 1993 produced tsunamis with larger wave heights than the Tohoku event.
https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/decommision/planaction/landwardwa....