A Year Without Spring - Record Number Of Days At Zero Or Below In Chicago, The Coldest Winter Ever; Lake Michigan 90% Covered In Ice, Highest Ever Recorded; Washington D.C. Sets 141-Year Record Low Temperature; New Orleans Endures One Of The Coldest Mardi Gras Ever; Low Temperature From 1884 Among Shattered State Record In Iowa; And Atlantic City, New Jersey Registers Coldest March Temperature Since 1874!

UNITED STATES - Based on the following stories, 2014 is on track to be the coldest winter ever in the United States. Low temperatures have not been measured since the 1800s. In January, Chicago registered 37 hours of uninterrupted subzero temperatures and nearly a week of school closures. Is subzero temperatures the new normal? It certainly feels that way.

Record Number Of Days At Zero Or Below In Chicago, The Coldest Winter Ever

Ice forms along the shore of Lake Michigan as temperatures hovered around -10 degrees on January 28, 2014
in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The unrelenting, bitter winter of 2013-14 is by one measure the coldest season in the history of Chicago.

This winter, there have been 26 days in which the low temperature was zero or below.

There were 25 subzero days in 1884-85, but no days at zero. In 2013-14, the low has dipped below zero 23 times, including 16 below on Jan 6, which set a record for that day.

The total below zero days ranks No. 4 all-time. There were two seasons–1935-36 and 1962-63–that had 24 below zero days.

The chances of seeing another day below zero in the next seven days is unlikely.

There have been a few days in mid- to late-March that have been sub-zero, but historically they are rare.

The average temperature for this season is near 19 degrees, the third coldest since records have been kept, starting in the 1800s.

The record is 18.3 degrees set in 1904.

A total of 90 percent of Lake Michigan is covered in ice, equaling the highest level ever. - CBS Chicago.

Lake Michigan 90% Covered In Ice, Highest Ever Recorded

(Credit: NOAA)

After having a meltdown early last week, Lake Michigan is now just over 90 percent covered in ice, which equals the highest levels ever recorded.

The lake was also just over 90 percent frozen in 1976, 1979 and 1994, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. 

The unyielding cold weather has caused the ice on Lake Michigan to continue to expand the last several days.

(Credit: NOAA)

The below high-resolution visible satellite image from March 2 shows widespread ice cover over central Lake Michigan.

A small area of open water remained on the eastern side of the lake, well away from the Michigan shore.

After reaching 80 percent coverage in mid-February, the lake melted during the brief warm up two weeks ago and was down to 40 percent as seen in this Feb. 26 image:

Satellite image of ice coverage on Lake Michigan on Feb. 26, 2014. (Credit: NOAA)

Last week, forecasters predicted the past several days of cold weather would increase coverage by around 15 percent.

Instead, it was more like 50 percent.

The record ice coverage for all five lakes was set in 1979 at nearly 95 percent.

In mid-February, the Great Lakes were nearly 90 percent covered in ice.

Last year, Lake Michigan was only 20 percent covered.

The average ice coverage is around 40 percent. 

- CBS Chicago.

Washington D.C. Sets 141-Year Record Low Temperature

The seemingly endless winter dumped a half a foot snow on the ground in parts of the South, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and many areas Tuesday morning saw something even more unusual in March: a blast of arctic air that sent temperatures plummeting into the single digits.

Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport broke a 141-year-old record low temperature, reaching 4 degrees. The National Weather Service said the low reached early Tuesday broke a 5-degree record set on the day in 1873. It was also a record low for the month of March. Dulles International Airport - also outside Washington - tied a 1993 record for the month at -1 degree.

Both airports broke record lows two days in a row.

Schools and government offices along the East Coast were closed Tuesday or delayed opening. Virginia State Police said slickened roads were factors in three traffic deaths. And authorities in Maryland's Prince George's County said a 60-year-old woman died after shoveling snow there.

Blame it on a return of the "polar vortex."

"That is the buzzword this winter, the polar vortex. That cold air just kind of migrates around the poles and the extreme northern latitudes all the time," said Jim Lee, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Sterling, Va. "The jet stream enables that colder air to move down the East Coast."

Monday's snowstorm followed a pattern that's become routine. Schools and government offices were closed. Federal workers stayed home - the fourth weather-related shutdown this season. Young adults gathered on the sloppy, slushy National Mall for a semi-organized, afternoon snowball fight.

Tourists, who flock to the nation's capital 365 days a year, were seeking out whatever activities they could find.

The National Air and Space Museum was the only Smithsonian institution open, and it drew a crowd. Among the visitors were Russ Watters, 60, of St. Louis, and his 14-year-old son, Seth, who was touring Washington with his 8th-grade class.

"We're trying to find stuff that's open, so this is open," Watters said.

The storm had a major effect south of the Mason-Dixon line. Governors declared states of emergency in Virginia and Tennessee, where there were hundreds of traffic accidents and tens of thousands of power outages. Nearly 3,000 flights were canceled Monday.

In Falls Church, Va., daredevils took advantage of another snow day by sledding down a steep hill behind an elementary school. Maya Luera, 11, said she wouldn't be so happy in June, when the school year will be extended because there's been so much snow.

"I'm more of a summer person, so I'd rather have more free time in the summer than the winter," she said. - MyFoxDC.

New Orleans Endures One Of The Coldest Mardi Gras Ever

It was a cold, wet day for Mardi Gras participants in New Orleans Tuesday.

The high temperature hit 40 degrees for the Big Easy, more than 20 degrees below the date's average temperature of 69 degrees. It rests one degree above the coldest high temperature on record for a Mardi Gras, which was 39 degrees on Feb. 14, 1899.

In past years when Fat Tuesday fell on March 4, the temperature was typically in the 60s or even high 70s. The previous coldest high for the celebrations on this date was 56 degrees in 1939.

After a cold front brought a few showers and colder weather to New Orleans on Monday, rain made a quick return just in time for Mardi Gras celebrations.

Rain moved throughout the area Tuesday, starting off as some morning showers followed by a steadier rain in the afternoon.

This rain will continue into the evening before tapering off overnight, making for a wet day.

Not only did people in New Orleans have to endure the rainy weather, but also the chilly weather brought by the passage of Monday's cold front.

The rain looks to clear the area on Wednesday for those heading home or staying to celebrate an extra day with temperatures rebounding to near 60. - AccuWeather.

Low Temperature From 1884 Among Shattered State Record In Iowa

The temperature may not have dropped as low as the minus-12 degrees predicted Monday morning, but it fell far enough to break records set in 1884. Des Moines recorded a low of minus-7 early Monday, just barely beating the previous record low of minus-6 degrees, set on March 3, 1884.

Some other Iowa cities didn’t cut it so close. Waterloo plummeted to minus-19 degrees, down from a 1978 low of minus-6. Ottumwa hit minus-9 degrees. Its previous record low was minus-4, set in 2002.

Temperatures quickly started ticking up after the record-setting morning, and Des Moines is expected to be on the upper end of a 45-degree swing in temperature by Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

Des Moines is expected to hit 28 degrees today, although wind chill values could drop as low as 0.

Central Iowa could also see snow late this afternoon and into the evening. Des Moines is expected to get less than one-half inch but other areas, including Mason City and Waterloo, could see up to 2 inches. - DesMoinesRegister.

Atlantic City, New Jersey Registers Coldest March Temperature Since 1874

The low temperature of 2 degrees above zero (-16.7c) at 1133 pm Monday evening March 3rd was a record not only for the date but also the entire month of March.

The previous record low for March 3 was 5 above zero (-15c) in 2009.

The previous all time low for the month of March was 3 above set on March 4 2009.

Official records for the Atlantic City area date back to 1874.

Also a record low daily minimum for Wilmington, Delaware…

The low temperature of 8 degrees (-13.3c)at 1120 pm Monday evening March 3rd was a new record for March 3rd.

The previous record for that date was 9 in 2009 and 1925.

Official records date back to 1894.

http://nws.noaa.gov/view/validprods.php?prod=rer&node=kphi 


- Ice Age Now.

POLE SHIFT: More Signs Of Earth's Magnetic Polar Migration - Most Unusual BLUE Auroras Seen Over Norway?!

Northern Lights are usually green, and sometimes red. Those are the colors produced by oxygen when it is excited by electrons raining down from space. On Feb. 22nd, Micha Bäuml of Straumfjord, Norway, witnessed an appariton of aurora-blue: 

"All of a sudden the sky exploded," says Micha. "The aurora looked like a giant flame." 

In auroras, blue is a sign of nitrogen. Energetic particles striking ionized molecular nitrogen (N₂⁺) at very high altitudes produces a cold azure glow of the type captured in Micha's photo. Why it overwhelmed the usual hues of oxygen on Feb 22nd is unknown. Auroras still have the capacity to surprise. 

Any auroras tonight, blue or otherwise, will be a bit of a surprise. Geomagnetic conditions are quiet. NOAA forecasters estimate a scant 5% chance of polar geomagnetic storms on March 3rd. - Space Weather.

"Like Armageddon" - Spectacular Storm Hits Sydney, Australia With Thunder, Lightning, Wild Showers And Stunning Cloud Formations! [PHOTOS]

Sydney was yesterday battered by a brief but spectacular storm that shook buildings in the CBD.

A storm comes from the south over Bondi Beach. Picture: Damian Shaw Source: Supplied

More than 12mm of rain was recorded at Sydney Airport between 4.30pm and 5pm, while severe thunder and lightning rocked the city.

The intense system was driven straight at the CBD by strong south-westerly winds.

Lightning strike as a storm passes over the suburb of Bangor in Sydney. Source: News Corp Australia

Like Armageddon: Storm Clouds roll across Sydney. Picture: Twotter/Jenni Eastbrook Source: Supplied

More than 22mm of rain was recorded in the Illawarra. Wind gusts exceeding 50km/h were also recorded along the NSW south coast. Sydney Airport received wind gusts approaching 60km/h.

The storm proved a nightmare for peak-hour commuters, with a number of roads and train lines suffering minor flooding.

A storm front moves over Bondi beach but at least one couple didn’t let it ruin their day.
Picture: Mark Evans Source: News Corp Australia

Trains were delayed on the Bankstown line after the tracks were partially closed by flooding near Marrickville station. The Transport Management Centre also reported the delays were exacerbated as emergency authorities treated a person injured by a train at Dulwich Hill.

Replacement buses were organised for travellers.

Passengers travelling on the Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra Line and South Coast Line have been advised to allow additional travel time due to a power supply problem at Sydenham.

A Qantas plane takes off as a large storm front arrives at Sydney airport from the South West.
Picture: Bradley Hunter Source: News Corp Australia

For the latest public transport information, visit www.transportnsw.info or call 131 500.

Wind gusts exceeding 50km/h have also been recorded along the NSW south coast.

Flight tracking website FlightAware showed how the storm affected aircraft movements. Source: Supplied

While the thunderstorms were expected to have cleared by today, intermittent showers are predicted to last right through to the weekend.

Last week the Bureau of Meteorology warned Sydneysiders to seek shelter and “get home early” as an intense tempest approached the city. - Daily Telegraph.

Hong Kong Reports Sixth H7N9 Bird Flu Case - Reigniting Fears That The Virus Could Mutate And Becoming Transmissible Between Humans, Triggering A Pandemic!

March 05, 2014 - HONG KONG - Hong Kong confirmed Tuesday a new human case of the deadly H7N9 avian flu found in an 18-month-old girl, the sixth case to be discovered in the city.

 Hong Kong reports sixth H7N9 bird flu case. AFP

Fears over avian flu have grown following the deaths of three men from the H7N9 strain in Hong Kong since December last year, all of whom had recently returned from mainland China. 

The child, who had also recently visited the mainland, was hospitalised on February 28 after developing a fever and was treated in an isolation ward, the city's health department said in a statement. 

She was sent home "in a stable condition" on Monday but routine laboratory test results later showed positive for the virus, the statement said. 

The girl is now in isolation in another hospital undergoing tests, but has no fever or symptoms.

She had travelled to the neighbouring Chinese province of Guangdong for three weeks in February, the health department said, where her mother had taken her to a wet market -- though they did not buy poultry.

Family members and patients from the first hospital that admitted the child will be taken in for testing and observation, the statement said. 

Others who may have had contact with the girl will be "put under medical surveillance", it added. 

A total of 31 people died from H7N9 bird flu in mainland China in January, the government said, making it by far the worst month of the outbreak. There were a total of 127 confirmed human H7N9 cases that month, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission. 

The outbreak, which first emerged on the mainland in February 2013, has reignited fears that a bird flu virus could mutate to become easily transmissible between people, threatening to trigger a pandemic. 

Hong Kong slaughtered 20,000 chickens in January after the virus was found in poultry imported from Guangdong. 

Officials said last month that they were extending for four months a ban on live poultry imports from mainland China to guard against the disease. 

Hong Kong is particularly alert to the spread of viruses after an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) swept through the city in 2003, killing 299 people and infecting around 1,800.

Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project; Taking Apart The Shattered Power Station And Its Three Melted Nuclear Cores Will Require Advanced Robotics!

March 05, 2014 - JAPAN - A radiation-proof superhero could make sense of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in an afternoon. Our champion would pick through the rubble to reactor 1, slosh through the pooled water inside the building, lift the massive steel dome of the protective containment vessel, and peek into the pressure vessel that holds the nuclear fuel. A dive to the bottom would reveal the debris of the meltdown: a hardened blob of metals with fat strands of radioactive goop dripping through holes in the pressure vessel to the floor of the containment vessel below. Then, with a clear understanding of the situation, the superhero could figure out how to clean up this mess.

Photo: Kyodo News/AP Photo

Unfortunately, mere mortals can’t get anywhere near that pressure vessel, and Japan’s top nuclear experts thus have only the vaguest idea of where the melted fuel ended up in reactor 1. The operation floor at the top level of the building is too radioactive for human occupancy: The dose rate is 54 millisieverts per hour in some areas, a year’s allowable dose for a cleanup worker. Yet, somehow, workers must take apart not just the radioactive wreck of reactor 1 but also the five other reactors at the ruined plant. 

This decommissioning project is one of the biggest engineering challenges of our time: It will likely take 40 years to complete and cost US $15 billion. The operation will involve squadrons of advanced robots, the likes of which we have never seen. 

Nothing has been the same in Japan since 11 March 2011, when one of history’s worst tsunamisflooded Fukushima Daiichi, crippled its emergency power systems, and triggered a series of explosions and meltdowns that damaged four reactors. A plume of radioactive material drifted over northeast Japan and settled on towns, forests, and fields, while plant workers scrambled to pour water over the nuclear cores to prevent further radioactive releases. Nine months later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the utility company that operates the plant, declared the situation stable. 

Stability is a relative concept: Although conditions at Fukushima Daiichi aren’t getting worse, the plant is an ongoing disaster scene. The damaged reactor cores continue to glow with infernal heat, so plant employees must keep spraying them with water to cool them and prevent another meltdown. But the pressure vessels and containment vessels are riddled with holes, and those leaks allow radioactive water to stream into basements. TEPCO is struggling to capture that water and to contain it by erecting endless storage tanks. The reactors are kept in check only by ceaseless vigilance. 

TEPCO’s job isn’t just to deal with the immediate threat. To placate the furious Japanese public, the company must clean up the site and try to remove every trace of the facility from the landscape. The ruin is a constant reminder of technological and managerial failure on the grand scale, and it requires a proportionally grand gesture of repentance. TEPCO officials have admitted frankly that they don’t yet know how to accomplish the tasks on their 40-year road map, a detailed plan for decommissioning the plant’s six reactors. But they know one thing: Much of the work will be done by an army of advanced robots, which Japan’s biggest technology companies are now rushing to invent and build.

The Site: During the 2011 accident, reactors 1, 2, and 3 ­suffered partial meltdowns. Explosions shattered reactor
buildings 1, 3, and 4. Reactors 5 and 6 are undamaged.  Illustration: James Provost

Here’s some more bad news: Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the only other commercial-scale nuclear accidents, can’t teach Japan much about how to clean up Fukushima Daiichi. The Chernobyl reactor wasn’t dismantled; it was entombed in concrete. The Three Mile Island reactor was defueled, but Lake Barrett, who served as site director during that decommissioning process, says the magnitude of the challenge was different. At Three Mile Island the buildings were intact, and the one melted nuclear core remained inside its pressure vessel. “At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima, he declares, has ever happened before.

Barrett, who is now a consultant for the Fukushima cleanup, says TEPCO is taking the only approach that makes sense: “You work from the outside in,” he says, dealing with all the peripheral problems in the buildings before tackling the heart of the matter, the melted nuclear cores. During the first three years of the cleanup, TEPCO has been surveying the site to create maps of radiation levels. The next step is removing radioactive debris and scrubbing radioactive materials off walls and floors. Spent fuel must be removed from the pools in the reactor buildings; leaks must be plugged. Only then will workers be able to flood the containment structures so that the melted globs of nuclear fuel can safely be broken up, transferred to casks, and carted away.

Many of the technologies necessary for the decommissioning already exist in some form, but they must be adapted to fit the unique circumstances of Fukushima Daiichi. “It’s like in the 1960s, when we wanted to put a man on the moon,” says Barrett. “We had rocketry, we had physics, but we had never put all the technologies together.” Just as with the moon shot, there is no guarantee that this epic project can be accomplished. But faced with the wrath of the Japanese people, TEPCO has no choice but to try.

To begin the first step—inspection—TEPCO sent in robots to map the invisible hot spots throughout the smashed reactor buildings. The first to arrive were the U.S.-made PackBot and Warrior, hastily shipped over from iRobot Corp. of Bedford, Mass. But Japan is justly proud of its own robotics industry, so the question arose, Why didn’t TEPCO have robots ready to respond in a nuclear emergency?Yoshihiko Nakamura, a University of Tokyo robotics professor, has the dispiriting answer. The government did fund a program on robotics for nuclear facilities in 2000, following a deadly accidentat a uranium reprocessing facility. But that project was shut down after a year. “[The government] said this technology is immature, and it is not applicable for the nuclear systems, and the nuclear systems are already 100 percent safe,” Nakamura explains. “They didn’t want to admit that the technology should be prepared in case of accident.”

Still, some roboticists in Japan carried on their own research despite the government’s indifference. In the lab of Tomoaki Yoshida, a roboticist at the Chiba Institute of Technology, near Tokyo, robots have learned to crawl over rubble and to climb up and down steps. These small tanks roll on a flexible series of treads, which can be lifted or lowered individually to allow the bot to manage stairs.

After the Fukushima accident, Yoshida’s academic research became very relevant. With seed money from the government, he constructed two narrow metal staircases proportioned like the 5-floor staircases inside the Fukushima Daiichi reactor buildings. This allowed Yoshida to determine whether his bots could navigate those cramped stairs and tight turns. His acrobatic Quince robots proved themselves able, and after hundreds of tests they received TEPCO’s clearance for field operations. In the summer of 2011, the Quince bots became the first Japanese robots to survey the reactor buildings.

The Quinces were equipped with cameras and dosimeters to identify radioactive hot spots. But the robots struggled with a communication issue: The nuclear plant’s massive steel and concrete structures interfere with wireless communication, so the Quinces had to unspool cables behind them to receive commands and transmit data to their operators. The drawback of that approach soon became apparent. One Quince’s cable got tangled and damaged on the third floor of reactor 2, and the lonely bot is still sitting there to this day, waiting for commands that can’t reach it.

Armed for Duty: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries contributed this two-armed bot, the MHI-MEISTeR. Its arms can
be fitted with a variety of tools, including one drill that can take a core sample from concrete walls and floors. Each
arm has seven degrees of freedom, making the bot a versatile and flexible worker.  Photo: Kyodo/AP Photo

Back at Yoshida’s lab, where modest bunk beds bespeak the dedication of his students, the team is currently working on a new and improved survey bot named Sakura. To guard against future tangles, Sakura not only unspools cable behind, it also automatically takes up the slack when it changes direction. It’s waterproof enough to roll through puddles, and it can carry a heavy camera capable of detecting gamma radiation. The bot can tolerate that radiation: Yoshida’s team tested its electronics (the CPU, microcontrollers, and sensors) and found that they’re radiation-tolerant enough to perform about 100 missions before any component is likely to fail. However, the robot itself becomes too radioactive for workers to handle. Sakura must therefore take care of itself: It recharges its batteries by rolling up to a socket and plugging itself in.

The second step in the Fukushima decommissioning is decontamination, because only when that is complete will workers be able to get inside to tackle more complex tasks. The explosions that shattered several of the reactor structures sprayed radioactive materials throughout the buildings, and the best protective suits for workers in hot zones are of little use against the resulting gamma radiation—a worker would have to be covered from head to toe in lead as thick as the width of a hand.

After the accident, the Japanese government called for robots that could work on decontamination, and several of Japan’s leading companies rose to the challenge. Toshiba and Hitachi have designed robots that use jets of high-pressure water and dry ice to abrade the surfaces of walls and floors; the robots will scour away radioactive materials along with top layers of paint or concrete and vacuum up the resulting sludge. But the robots’ range is defined by their own communication cables, and they can carry only limited amounts of their cleaning agents. Another bot, the Raccoon, has already begun nosing across the floor in reactor building 2, trailing long hoses behind it to supply water and suction.

To clear a path for the robotic janitors, another class of robots has been invented to pick up debris and cut through obstacles. The ASTACO-SoRa, from Hitachi, has two arms that can reach 2.5 meters and lift 150 kilograms each. The tools on the ends of the arms—grippers, cutting blades, and a drill—can be exchanged to suit the task. However, Hitachi’s versatile bot is limited to work on the first floor, as it can’t climb stairs.

 

Out Of The Pool: Spent fuel pools inside the damaged reactor buildings contain hundreds of nuclear fuel
assemblies. TEPCO is emptying reactor 4’s pool [top] first. In the extraction process, a cask is lowered into
the pool and filled with radioactive fuel assemblies. Then the cask is transported to a safer location,
lowered into another pool [middle], and unloaded. The job is made more complicated because
some of the assemblies are covered with debris [bottom] from the accident's explosions.
Photos: TEPCO

Removing spent fuel rods is the third step. Each reactor building holds hundreds of spent fuel assemblies in a pool on its top floor. These unshielded pools, perfectly safe when filled with water, became a focus of public fear during the Fukushima Daiichi accident. After reactor building 4 exploded on 15 March, many experts worried that the blast had damaged the structural integrity of that building’s pool and allowed the water to drain out. The pool was soon determined to be full of water, but not before the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had caused an international panic by declaring it dry and dangerous. The reactor 4 pool became one of TEPCO’s urgent decommissioning priorities, not only because it’s a real vulnerability but also because it’s a potent reminder of the accident’s terrifying first days.

The process of emptying that pool began in November 2013. TEPCO workers use a newly installed cranelike machine to lower a cask into the pool, then long mechanical arms pack the submerged container with fuel assemblies. The transport cask, fortified with shielding to block the nuclear fuel’s radiation, is lowered to a truck and brought to a common pool in a more intact building. The building 4 pool contains 1533 fuel assemblies, and moving them all to safety is expected to take a year. The same procedure must be performed at the highly radioactive reactors 1, 2, and 3 and the undamaged (and less challenging) reactors 5 and 6.

Containing the radioactive water that flows freely through the site is the fourth step. Every day, about 400 metric tons of groundwater streams into the basements of Fukushima Daiichi’s broken buildings, where it mixes with radioactive cooling water from the leaky reactor vessels. TEPCO treats that waterto remove most of its radioactive elements, but it can’t be rendered entirely pure—and as a result local fishermen have protested plans to release it into the sea. To store the accumulating water, TEPCO has installed more than 1000 massive tanks, which themselves must be monitored vigilantly for leaks.

TEPCO hopes to stop the flow of groundwater with a series of pumps and underground walls, including an “ice wall” made of frozen soil. Still, at some point the Japanese public must grapple with a difficult question: Can the stored water ever be released into the sea? Barrett, the former site director of Three Mile Island, has argued publicly that the processed water is safe, as contamination is limited to trace amounts of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is less dangerous than other radioactive materials because it passes quickly through the body; after it’s diluted in the Pacific, Barrett says, it would pose a negligible threat. “But releasing that water is an emotional issue, and it would be a public relations disaster,” he says. The alternative is to follow the Three Mile Island example and gradually dispose of the water through evaporation, a process that would take many years.

TEPCO must also plug the holes in the reactor vessels that allow radioactive cooling water to flow out. Many of the leaks are thought to be in the suppression chambers, doughnut-shaped structures that ring the containment vessel and typically hold water, which is used to regulate temperature and pressure inside the pressure vessel during normal operations. Shunichi Suzuki, TEPCO’s general manager of R&D for the Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning, explains that one of his priorities is developing technologies to find the leak points in the suppression chambers.

“There are some ideas for a submersible robot,” Suzuki says, “but it will be very difficult for them to find the location of the leaks.” He notes that both the suppression chambers and the rooms that surround them are now filled with water, so there’s no easy way to spot the ruptures; it’s not like finding the hole in a leaky pipe that’s spraying water into the air. Among the robot designs submitted by Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba is one bot that would crawl through the turbid water and use an ultrasonic sensor to find the breaches in the suppression chambers’ walls.

If robots prove impractical, TEPCO may take a more heavy-handed approach and start pouring concrete into the suppression chamber or the pipes that lead to it. “If it’s possible to make a seal between the containment vessel and the suppression chamber, then the leaks don’t matter,” Suzuki says. One way or another, TEPCO hopes to have all the leaks stopped up within three years. Sealing the leaks is a necessary precondition for the final and most daunting task.

Water, Water Everywhere: Groundwater flowing through the site mixes with radioactive cooling water leaking
from reactor buildings and must therefore be stored and treated. To contain the accumulating water, TEPCO
is filling fields with storage tanks [bottom]. These tanks must be monitored for leaks [top]. In August 2013,
TEPCO admitted that 300 metric tons of contaminated water had leaked from one tank. 
Photos, top: TEPCO; bottom: The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP Photo

Removing the three damaged nuclear cores is the last big step in the decommissioning. As long as that melted fuel glows inside reactors 1, 2, and 3, Fukushima Daiichi will remain Japan’s ongoing nightmare. Only once the fuel is safely packed up and carted away can the memory begin to fade. But it will be no easy task: TEPCO estimates that removing the three melted cores will take 20 years or more.

First, workers will flood the containment vessels to the top so that the water will shield the radioactive fuel. Then submersible robots will map the slumped fuel assemblies within the pressure vessels; these bots may be created by adapting those used by the petroleum industry to inspect deep-sea oil wells. Next, enormously long drills will go into action. They must be capable of reaching 25 meters down to the bottoms of the pressure vessels and breaking up the metal pooled there. Other machines will lift the debris into radiation-shielded transport casks to be taken away.

Making the task more complicated is the design of the reactors. They have control rods that project through the bottom of the pressure vessels, and the entry point for each of those control rods is a weak spot. Experts believe that most of the fuel in reactor 1, and some in reactors 2 and 3, leaked down through those shafts to pool on the floor of the containment vessel below. To reach that fuel, some 35 meters down, TEPCO workers will have to drill through the steel of the pressure vessel and work around a forest of wires and pipes.

Before TEPCO can even develop the proper fuel-handling tools, Suzuki says, the company must get a better understanding of the properties of the corium—the technical term for the mess of metals left behind after a meltdown. The company can’t just copy the drills that broke up the melted core of the Three Mile Island reactor, says Suzuki. “At Three Mile Island, [the core] remained in the pressure vessel,” he says. “In our case, it goes through the pressure vessel, so it melted stainless steel. So our fuel debris must be harder.” The melted fuel may also have a lavalike consistency, with a hard crust on top but softer materials inside. TEPCO is now working with computer models and is planning to make an actual batch of corium in a laboratory to study its properties.

When the core material is broken up and contained, it will be whisked away to some to-be-determined storage facility. Over the decades its radioactivity will gradually fade, along with the Japanese public’s memory of the accident. It’s a shame that those twisted blobs of corium are too dangerous to be displayed in a museum, where a placard could explain that we human beings are so clever, we’re capable of building machines we can’t control.

Depending on whom you ask, nuclear power stations like Fukushima Daiichi are exemplars of either humanity’s ingenuity or hubris. But, the museum placard might add, these metallic blobs, plucked from the heart of an industrial horror, prove something else—that we humans also have the grit and perseverance to clean up our mistakes. - IEEE Spectrum.