Let Frozen Wall Go

While most people cannot believe in the effect, Tokyo Electric Power Company started building “underground frozen wall” around broken First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture on Monday. Although the wall is expected to contain contaminated water from the plant site, there is no example such a big system blocked flow of underground water. The attitude of the government of Japan toward this technology, or something like magic spell, is “Let it go.”

Frozen wall is a technology of freezing earth soil by making fence underground to block water flow. According to the plan, the land of the site will be surrounded by freezing piles with lengths of 5,000 ft and depth of 100 ft. The piles will be generated to a temperature of -22°F to freeze earth around. TEPCO has been trying to persuade the public that the device would freeze the land. It was as if they would do that in a way Princess Elsa brought eternal winter on her kingdom in the story of an animated movie, Frozen.

If they simply believed in the fantasy, it is a serious tragedy for Japanese people. There is no evidence that only 100 ft-depth wall can block all the water. Even how experts assured the depth would be enough, considering structure of stratum, possible impacts of another great earthquake or unexpected flow of underground water may break the system down. As they do in by-passing underground water, extracting all radioactive materials except tritium, TEPCO is doubted to be flowing contaminated water to the sea at as low level as unconscious to the world.

The land freezing system is expected to work, staring from March 2015, for seven years until fixing cracks of buildings in the site to block underground water coming in. However, the system has mainly been for construction of tunnels and never before used for this kind of broad and long-term project. It costs $320 million to build the system, and requires as much electricity for maintenance worth 13,000 families consumption. It cannot be viable in terms of cost performance.

Although Prime Minister Shinzo Abe boasted that the government had been blocking all contaminated water, it had never actually controlled all the water. 400 metric tons of contaminated water is still flowing into the sea every day. Water purification system called ALPS has frequently been in trouble. In this country with extremely fast and complicated water system, and with high frequency of great earthquake, controlling water is not something achieved with minor technological breakthrough. It is better for the government to persuade the world not by unrealistic story, but by providing with accurate information about what is exactly going on.