Tag: nuclear disaster

OM in the News: The Nuclear Waste Challenge at Fukushima 6 Years Later

Six years after the largest nuclear disaster this century, reports The New York Times (March 13, 2017), Japanese officials have still not solved a basic problem: what to do with an ever-growing pile of radioactive waste. Each form of waste at the Nuclear Power Station presents its own challenges. It is a massive OM issue worthy of class discussion when you cover the chapters on Project Management and Sustainability. Here is a rundown on the complexity of this $188 billion project:

400 Tons of Contaminated Water per day. Japan is pumping water nonstop through the reactors to cool melted fuel that remains too hot and radioactive to remove. The 1,000 storage tanks already hold 962,000 tons of contaminated water, but the plant is running out of room to store it.

3,519 Containers of Radioactive Sludge. The process of decontaminating the water leaves radioactive sludge trapped in filters, which are being held in thousands of containers.

64,700 Cubic Meters of Discarded Clothes. The 6,000 cleanup workers put on new protective gear every day. These hazmat suits, face masks, etc., are thrown out at the end of each shift. The clothing is stored in 1,000 steel boxes stacked around the site.

Branches from 220 Acres of Deforested Land. The plant’s grounds were once dotted with trees, and a portion was even designated as a bird sanctuary.

200,400 Cubic Meters of Radioactive Rubble have been removed so far and stored in the equivalent of about 3,000 standard 40-foot shipping containers.

3.5 Billion Gallons of Soil Have Been Bagged. Japan will eventually incinerate some of the soil, but that will only reduce the volume of the radioactive waste, not eliminate it.

1,573 Nuclear Fuel Rods. The condition and location of this molten fuel debris are still largely unknown. The plan is to use robots to find and remove it. But the rubble, the lethal levels of radiation and the risk of letting radiation escape make this exceedingly difficult. A robot inserted into one of the reactors detected radiation levels high enough to kill a person in less than a minute.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How does this cleanup project compare to other massive ones like those discussed in Chapter 3?
  2. Why is this a sustainability issue?

OM in the News: The Japanese Nuclear Cleanup–A 20 Year Project?

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?