[AmericanInTokyo]

I don’t know if anyone really thinks that is a realistic time frame...so this will more than likely be a first iteration.

[chimera]

Seems pessimistic to me. This is a common way of bounding the worst-case of an unknown situation. Remember we heard things like the Deepwater Horizon spill was going to be an "Extinction-Level Event". The Gulf was still there, last I heard. When Saddam blew up Kuwait's oil fields when we kicked him out after the first Gulf War, those fires were going to burn for "decades". They were all out within a year and the fields were back in production.

The major problem right now is to establish some kind of closed-loop cooling on the three reactors and one SFP. That will get away from this once-through cooling they are doing now that keeps flushing effluents out and causing the problems with handling and disposal. But its a conundrum because to get loop cooling you need to get in there and do some plumbing to connect the lines, which is difficult when you have high dose rate effluents being pumped out.

[gandalftb]

Controlled cold shutdowns usually take 2 years. My guess they’ll be close to that or more.