Tepco Decontamination to Produce Radioactive Sludge Crisis

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) Tokyo Electric Power Co., which is struggling to contain the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years, has another crisis on its hands: finding storage for enough radioactive sludge to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

The utility known as Tepco plans to start decontaminating millions of liters of water poured over melted reactors after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems. By the end of the year it expects to have 2,000 cubic meters of highly radioactive sludge separated from the water, said Teruaki Kobayashi, a nuclear facility manager at Tepco.

“We haven’t determined a final disposal site for the waste,” Kobayashi said in an interview yesterday. “Our priorities are decontaminating radioactive water and maintaining cooling efforts.”

Tepco has yet to say how much radiation has been released by the crippled reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in the three months since the meltdowns started. Government tests in May showed radioactive soil in pockets of areas outside a 20- kilometer (12 mile) exclusion zone around the plant have reached the same level as Chernobyl, where a “dead zone” remains since a reactor exploded in 1986. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-14/tepco-faces-radioactive-sludge-crisis.html

[TheMadMonk]

1. We also have a major lead glass disposal crisis as flat panel TVs & monitors...

...replace older cathode ray tube displays.

How's this for good enough for now solution.

Melt the two together, cast as bricks and pile them in a corner somewhere. Perhaps even drop them in the Marinaras subduction zone.

Not perfect, but a shit ton better than standing around with thumbs up arses while we wait for a "perfect" answer to manifest.