Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Will an underground ice wall work at Fukushima?

The wall will consist of frozen dirt 100 feet deep and be nearly a mile in length. It is intended to halt an unrelenting flood of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings since the disaster five years ago. The plan is to seal off the reactor buildings within a vast, rectangular-shaped barrier of man-made permafrost; the frozen soil will act as a dam to block new groundwater from entering the buildings. It will also help stop leaks of radioactive water into the nearby Pacific Ocean, which have decreased significantly since the calamity but may be continuing.

1 comment:

R J Adams said...

It sounds like one of those mad-cap schemes, like tipping loads of iron filings into the sea to stop global warming, or putting huge mirrors in space to reflect sunlight. Maybe I'm just getting old, but we seem to grow crazier by the day.