Japan: "Chernobyl solution"

[madmax]

"If cooling fails, Japan may bury reactor"

"JAPAN appears to be considering a "Chernobyl solution" to end its nuclear crisis as emergency crews, technicians and a growing army of international experts struggle to bring Fukushima's reactors and spent fuel rods under control.
But while the Tokyo Electric Power Co said the option was "not an impossibility", cooling the reactors was the priority.

As seawater was hosed through blast holes in the reactor walls, engineers said burying the Fukushima complex in concrete and sand was an absolute last resort.

That strategy, which was used when the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986, would represent a worst-case conclusion to the nuclear crisis, and leave an area just 240km north of Tokyo effectively off-limits for decades.

It is not known whether the combined effects of the earthquake, tsunami and hydrogen explosions have left the pumps able to perform the vital task of cooling the most threatened part of the plant -- the third reactor, with its dangerously low pool of water and its "dirty bomb" viscera of radioactive fuel."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/if-cooling-fails-japan-may-bury-reactor/story-fn84naht-1226025038550