http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/world/asia/17cleanup.html
Nuclear Cleanup Plans Hinge on Unknowns
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: April 16, 2011
>>>(madly) snipped
...
A global team led by Hitachi said Thursday that
it would take at least three decades to return the site to what engineers refer to as a green field state, meaning within legal limits of radiation for any residents.
Toshiba, Japans biggest supplier of nuclear reactors,
said it could take as little as 10 years...
..
.Billions of dollars are likely to be
at stake in the cleanup,
which could help Hitachi and Toshiba buoy their sinking bottom lines. The two said last week that
annual profits would fall short of their forecasts because of the widespread disruptions in production and supply chains caused by the disaster.
...
Still,
Toshibas engineers expect the plant to stabilize in several months, Mr. Sasaki said, and for full-scale cooling to resume. It would be
five years before engineers would be able to open the pressure vessels to remove the nuclear fuel, he said, and dismantling the reactors and cleaning up radiation at the plant would take at least another five years...
...
A
Hitachi spokesman in Tokyo, Yuichi Izumisawa,
said that the 10-year projection was overly optimistic. He said that
Hitachis engineers expected it to take that long just to remove the nuclear fuel rods from the plant and place them in casks to transport to a safe storage facility.
Only then can the dismantling of the plants structures begin, he said, followed by the cleanup of the remaining radiation.
...
(article continues)
<<<snip
Really? The "experts" opinions on cleanup differ by 20
years, but everybody can agree that there are billions of dollars - up for grabs?
This disgusts me. Who gives a happy damn about some "bottom line" in the face of such a thing? Really! Really?
I want to hide under the bed.