FUKUSHIMA, Japan —Japan’s industry ministry on Friday showed the news media a site testing underground walls of frozen soil, the full-fledged version to begin construction next month to prevent groundwater from mixing with contaminated water at Tokyo Electric Power’s crippled
FUKUSHIMA, Japan —Japan’s industry ministry on Friday showed the news media a site testing underground walls of frozen soil, the full-fledged version to begin construction next month to prevent groundwater from mixing with contaminated water at Tokyo Electric Power’s crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The government plans to build 30-meter-deep underground walls by freezing soil around the outer 1.5-kilometer perimeter of reactors Nos. 1 to 4 at the plant to keep groundwater from flowing into the reactor buildings and becoming highly contaminated.
The walls will cost 32 billion yen ($315.2 million) to build, the government said.
In the experimental project, frozen-soil walls were created in March around a 10-meter-square patch of land near the No. 4 reactor building, to test their effectiveness in blocking groundwater.
Around the test site, many pipes are buried to circulate coolant that freezes the soil.
On Friday, the Natural Resources and Energy Agency at the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry presented to the press a 1.2-meter-deep, five-meter-square hole used to monitor the frozen soil walls.
The frozen wall’s temperature was 3 degrees below zero (26.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and it was too hard to be broken even with a hammer. There was no water at the bottom of the hole because the walls block groundwater from flowing through them, according to the agency.
