Fukushima: No one else has any ideas...let's try mine.

 Maybe it CAN be cleaned up. I have been thinking that it might well be possible. I am trying to find enough data to make an assessment. It wouldn't be easy, and it wouldn't be cheap. But the alternative is worse. I'll sleep on this idea and start researching it in the morning but the idea is that 100 nautical miles off Fukushima is the Japan trench. It's about 20,000 feet deep. The bottom is soft sediment.

Now...the 4 reactors are melting down. The cores are probably 60 or 80 feet deep - no one knows. But 80 feet is nothing. They could, in fact, drill under those cores. Ten feet of dirt protects you from radiation, but we'll use 50 feet. Let's drill pits under each of those cores. 

Good sized pits - but still not as much rock as the Chunnel or the Holland tunnel or many mines. These things are not that big. Then let's pour in a few thousand tons of molten iron and cover it with concrete made from Boron, Bentonite clay (Wal-Mart cat litter) and some Fulvic minerals and make a big cup.

Now dig up until we drop each reactor, core, containment and all into our cup, pour the same mess on top and cover it with molten iron to form a big, ironclad egg. 

We have at least ten or twenty feet of concrete and a couple feet of iron between us and the core, so we don't care if it's still reacting - of course it is - but without water, it can't form hydrogen gas and explode. 

Now we tow those things 100 miles offshore and sink them. If they are strong enough, we can just drop them and they'll imbed under a hundred feet or so of mud. If they are solid, they might not crush, although they's surely fracture from the water pressure - I'll leave that engineering issue to whoever wants to warranty the egg. 

Gravity still works, so eventually, when the cores melt through, they will continue toward the mantle and disappear. 

I'm going to suggest that any further seismic activity there, and it won't ever stop, will simply speed the process rather than spitting up the cores. They will be well and truly buried.

All of the equipment used until the things are encased will have to be put on a ship and sunk as well - and thousands of people will die of radiation. But as it is now, MILLIONS will die and the thing will still be releasing radiation for hundreds of years.

Comments? Questions? Ideas, Obvious problems? 

Yes, there would have to be a steel mill built near there, or maybe RIGHT there.

Yes, a concrete batch plant would be required. 

Yes, we have to stabilize the R4 fuel pool in a damn hurry. I'd say sealing the building with concrete and filling it with a boron slurry for the rods to fall into is about the only plan. After they fall, it's curtains.

It might still be possible to pop a small nuke in that building and burn up all that MOX - there will be hellacious fallout unless you did it during a monsoon. But there is going to be MORE fallout if they don't step up.

I'm going to sleep. Let's save the world.