Five weeks into the Fukushima nuclear powerplant crisis, Tokyo Electric Power Co. on April 17 announced a road map leading to a cold shutdown that will minimize radioactive emissions and allow emergency evacuations around the plant to be lifted.
The six- to nine-month plan calls for building new cooling systems as well as enclosures for four damaged reactors while limiting worker exposure to high radiation. “[The work is] very challenging because of the radiation levels,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., who is following the crisis. The nine-month schedule, he believes, “is aggressive but not unreasonable.”