Fukushima Nuclear Plant Cleanup May Take More Than 40 Years 218
mdsolar writes "'A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.' Meanwhile, Gregory B. Jaczko, former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology."
Re:Cost of nuclear power (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my god, don't start putting logic into your fiscal planning and equations! That's not how the world works. Witch! Burn the Witch!!!
Re:They could use Canadian reactors.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cheap at half the price! (Score:4, Funny)
Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Luckily, there is a solution! When our man Larry Summers was chief economist at the World Bank, he did a little writing [whirledbank.org]...
In this case, we can't really export the pollution(gathering the radioactive particles simply isn't plausible or cost effective); but we can import the population! Other than the carcinogenic fallout, it's a nice piece of real estate. Plenty of people live in places that are much ghastlier, even without fallout. All we have to do is find the wealthiest tenants who still live in a place with higher mortality(eg. from tropical parasites or malnutrition from marginally arable land) and offer them an attractively priced 50 year lease. The new occupants overall mortality goes down slightly, Japan makes some money back, and everyone basks in the warm glow of the human spirit, and gamma radiation.
How could this possibly be a bad plan?