COOL PLAN

Japan Building $470m Ice Wall

To stop Fukushima leaks.

It’s expensive, but will it work? Japan announced plans to spend a half billion dollars to build a subterranean wall of ice to control radioactive water leaks from the Fukushima nuclear plant. The site has been leaking hundreds of tons of contaminated water since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that damaged its cooling towers and melted three of its reactors. The proposed wall of frozen earth will be made of pipes filled with coolant in hopes of preventing the ground water from being contaminated by radioactive water used to cool the reactors, 300 tons of which leaked from the temporary storage tanks just last month.