If Cooling Fails, Japan May Bury Fukushima Nuclear Plant

It's how Chernobyl's busted reactors met their final demise: encasing the entire nuclear plant in a concrete sarcophagus to seal it off from the world forever.

The idea of burying Japan's stricken nuclear plant under tons of concrete and sand has been considered a last-ditch solution since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake sent a tsunami crashing into the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant one week ago today. Now that final option is inching closer to reality, as efforts to douse the broken reactors with seawater appear to be failing.

An official from the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., acknowledged for the first time today that burying the plant remains an option, although workers are still hoping the water-dousing operation will work.

If Cooling Fails, Japan May Bury Stricken Nuke Plant

Kyodo News, AP

Smoke billows Wednesday from the damaged unit 3 at Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Burying the plant under tons of concrete and sand is being considered if cooling fails.

"It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first," the official told a news conference, according to Reuters. An official with Japan's Nuclear Security Agency made a similar statement.

The effort would take months and involve dumping massive quantities of sand over the still-smoldering Fukushima plant, perhaps by helicopter or plane. Then the whole radioactive pile of rubble and sand would be sealed off with more tons of concrete and steel beams -- burying any dangerous materials so deep under cement that they would be rendered safe for human life.

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At Chernobyl, where an erupting Soviet station emitted radiation in 1986, a similar effort took seven months and required miners to burrow under the failed plant to block it from underneath.

Chernobyl was the world's worst-ever nuclear disaster, classified as category 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale -- the highest level. Today, Japanese authorities raised the Fukushima crisis a notch from level 4 to level 5, putting it on par with the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.

Some American experts say a so-called sarcophagus operation for the Fukushima plant could take even longer than the one at Chernobyl.

"It will take a year or two just to get the plant stabilized and find out what the conditions are," Chuck Negin, executive vice president of Project Enhancement Corp., who has worked on decommissioning nuclear facilities for the U.S. Department of Energy, told The New York Times.

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The trouble spots in Fukushima are also much larger than those at Chernobyl, where only one reactor failed. In Japan, damage has been reported at three of the Fukushima plant's reactors, and at two spent-fuel storage pools nearby. Radioactive leaks there are so widespread that the construction of a sarcophagus would likely have to be done by robots and machines, because it's deadly for humans to get close enough. That would cost even more money and time.

Chernobyl's sarcophagus lasted nearly 25 years, but it never blocked out all radioactive emissions altogether. Part of it cracked last year and is again emitting more low-level gases. A new outer shell is due to be installed later this year, at a cost of more than $1 billion.