Cold Shutdown

In a remarkable display of political hubris, the Japanese government announced on Friday that they had successfully achieved a cold shutdown of the three stricken reactors at Fukushima. In a narrow, technical sense that was correct: the temperature inside what remains of the reactor cores is now consistently below 100 degrees celsius. And that is about it.

The term 'shutdown', purposefully chosen, implies something that has essentially being ended or switched off, but Fukushima is a couple of decades, if not generations, from that. The list of problems that still have to be overcome is equally long and daunting: removing the nuclear fuel from the bottom of the containment vessels it melted through; the small lake sized worth of radioactive fuel that has accumulated in and under the plant (and which continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean); the safe removal of the fuel rods from the top of reactor number 4 (and which have been consistently leaking radioactivity into the atmosphere for the past nine months - the roof got blown off in a hydrogen explosion and they have been exposed to the elements ever since).

Then there are what Donald Rumsfeld so memorably described as the "unknown unknowns". The nature and severity of the crisis at Fukushima is unprecedented; reference has been made to both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but that is only because they are, or rather were, all nuclear power stations. There the comparisons end as what occurred at Fukushima - three reactors suffering simultaneous meltdowns, the complete failure of all back-up systems, a series of explosions, and the vast (and still not yet fully quantified) dispersal of radioactive air and water over a wide area; is the sort of cumulative accident nobody imagined, or rather, wanted to imagine. And we still don't know how bad the situation is within the actual containment units - they are too dangerous yet for any form of human observation.

Basically everyone from the Government down through the TEPCO officials to the day laborers working on site, are contending with various levels of ignorance as to what needs to be done and more pertinently, how it will be done. They are, essentially, making it up as they go along.

So, the term 'cold shutdown' is more PR than science. Nor are the Japanese public buying it. The evening NHK news on Friday carried interviews with a number of evacuees from around the nuclear plant and all of them expressed a mixture of cynicism at the government's announcement and anger at the continued uncertainty surrounding their future.

Despite repeated pronouncements that it will take upwards of 40 years to fully shutdown the plant, no politician has come forward and stated the glaring obvious - that it will be a similar length of time before many of the displaced people from the area can return to their homes. Or rather, their descendants can return to their parents/grandparents homes. And who, in their right, cesium-free mind, would want to do that?