When the senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) engineer at Three 
Mile Island’s cleanup compares our 1979 explosion to the Japanese disaster, and says ours “was a walk in the park compared to what they have”, we know we are talking about a massive project. And the TMI cleanup took 14 years! “The cores are probably very similar, partially melted”‘ he adds, but in Japan 4 separate reactors are damaged, and fixing each one is complicated by the presence of its leaking neighbors.
Today’s New York Times (April 20,2011) describes the steps project managers must follow in the lengthy cleanup. But before they even begin, Tokyo Power has only 3 weeks to patch up smashed containment units before the rainy season starts and more contamination is washed into the environment. And the company has to watch that its small staff of skilled workers does not absorb too much radiation doing so.
Here are the 6 main steps that may take 20 years to complete:
1. Clean up the water in the basements of the buildings.
2. Install new pumps to recirculate the water in the reactors (to end radioactive releases).
3. Decontaminate the walls and floors.
4. Rebuild the containments for units 1,2, and 4, so workers can defuel the reactors. (That step took 5 years at TMI, where no buildings had to be rebuilt).
5. Remove the wrecked fuel in the core. This involves creating new remote-controlled tools to cut through the metal and get to the material below.
6. Reprocess the radiated debris (or bury it as we did in shielded casks in Idaho).
This massive task makes our project management examples in Ch. 3 (like rebuilding Iraq) look trivial. We can only hope they first read the article “What Great Projects Have in Common” in MIT Sloan Review that we reviewed last week.
Discussion questions:
1. Why is this project more complex than rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina?
2. How do the Japanese benefit from TMI?