Posted on 05/31/2011 5:53:33 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Stabilizing reactors by year's end may be impossible: Tepco
Kyodo
Stabilizing the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant by the end of the year may be impossible, senior officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday, throwing a monkey wrench into plans to let evacuees return to their homes near the plant.
The confirmation of core meltdowns hitting reactors 1 through 3, accompanied by breaches to the critical pressure vessels that hold the nuclear fuel, has led officials to believe that "there will be a major delay to work" to contain the situation, one official said.
Tepco, the plant's operator, announced on April 17 its road map for bringing the troubled reactors into a cold shutdown within six to nine months.
Even though the fuel in the No. 1 reactor was later found to have melted through the pressure vessel, the utility said as recently as May 17 that it did not see a need to revise its projections.
But "the nine months is just a target deadline for which we are making efforts," a senior Tepco official said, indicating that the likely delay will affect the plan to review the evacuation of local residents. The government is hoping to review the order once the reactors are brought under control.
(Excerpt) Read more at search.japantimes.co.jp ...
P!
How many of the decision makers at TEPCO have died by their own hand since this thing started?
After all of this time and they are still guessing about what is actually going on. I thought they would by now have a pretty good idea of exactly what the condition of the reactor vessels are but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Is there no way for some sort of camera to be sent in remotely in order to get verification of exactly what they are dealing with? All we hear is how the best experts in the world are focused on this, but it is a continuing fuster-cluck over there (and getting bigger every time another news story breaks) with no end in sight and virtually no firm grasp of the actual conditions of the plant, the surrounding area, or anything else.
Check back in 5 years when cancers start showing up.
Evacuate, don’t evacuate, evacuate, don’t evacuate. We don’t know our heads from our rears but trust us. Not that it’s feasible but everything is A-ok now that we have a stated goal.
Between posts #3 & #4 methinks we may have a solution.
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