Millions of gallons of highly radioactive water are accumulating on the site, as a result of drenching the stricken reactors to try to prevent them melting down, as the accident is officially raised to the most serious level available under international standards, a rating only previously awarded to the Chernobyl catastrophe twenty five years ago this month.
A lethal lake of some 15 million gallons of the stuff has already built up in the depths of the nuclear complex, and hundreds of thousands more are being added to it every day. It will all have to be made harmless before the site can be declared safe – and that, experts say, will take many years.
“There’s nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before”, Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy, told the Los Angeles Times. And Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the US Nuclear regulatory commission, added that it would be a “bigger job” than a similar clean-up operation planned at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation at a cost of $100 – $130 billion.