Fukushima Decontamination Cost Estimated $50bn, With Questionable Effectiveness 221
AmiMoJo writes "Experts from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology studied the cost of decontamination for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, estimating it at $50 billion. They estimate that decontamination in no-entry zones will cost up to 20 billion dollars, and in other areas, 31 billion dollars. It includes the cost of removing, transporting and storing radioactive waste such as contaminated soil. The central government has so far allocated about 11 billion dollars and the project is already substantially behind schedule. Meanwhile the effectiveness of the decontamination is being questioned. NHK compared data from before and after decontamination at 43 districts in 21 municipalities across Fukushima Prefecture. In 33 of the districts, or 77 percent of the total, radiation levels were still higher than the government-set standard of one millisievert per year. In areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where decontamination has been carried out on an experimental basis, radiation levels remain 10 to 60 times higher than the official limit."
Re:50 bil? (Score:3, Informative)
it's not even as much as the fed reserve wastes in a month
The fed is printing $85 billion a month [bloomberg.com] just to keep the federal debt bubble from popping and bankrupting Earth.
Re:50 bil? (Score:3, Informative)
Japan is paying about that much per year for the additional LNG and coal they have to import in order to compensate for the missing nuclear energy
Re:Huge waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
The cleaned areas have a radiation level of 1mS a year. To put that into perspective, people living in Denver [isis-online.org] get 11.8mS a year from natural sources. This area is NOT uninhabitable. Not that this makes TEPCO any less foolish...
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Another idea could also be not to build the traditional nuclear-plants that where designed for producing material for nuclear weapons..
Thorium reactors can be one alternative but there are more variants that can also be safe.
The point i'm trying to make is that there are ways to build reactors so they are basically impossible to go critical.. As long as the containment building can survive anything that we or nature can throw at it we are pretty much safe, talking about no need for human oversight or even electricity...
But really long for the day when fusion-reactors will be the standard..... Or maybe if someone could in a cheap and effective way do direct conversion from radioactivity to electricity, this would allow for low radioactive sources to be used and it could be deployed to extract energy from the already existing depots of discarded fuel.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
And the goal for renewable energy use won't be met. It won't be even close. German government knows this just fine - so the official target for renewable electricity got lowered down to 35% by 2020. And it will be lowered down even more in future.
Do you see any protests from Greens? No? Yup, because these fucking hippies are the direct cause of this.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
No-one has any idea how many people this disaster has, or will, cause.
Im pretty sure radiation experts know what the dosages were in, around, and at a distance from the plant, and it is well documented what levels of radiation do what to the human body.
There were two workers who went into the plant during the meltdown to access the core who got doses that could be described as "concerning"; they were treated at a hospital and I believe released the same day. Only 3 workers (including the two I mentioned) recieved a dose over 100mSv; Wikipedia notes [wikipedia.org]
In 2012 the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation stated that for typical background radiation levels (1-13 mSv per year) it's not possible to account for any health effects and for exposures under 100 mSv
The amount of hysteria here is unbelievable. For the record,
10 to 30 mSv -single full-body CT scan[17][18]
68 mSv -estimated maximum dose to evacuees who lived closest to the Fukushima I nuclear accidents