As it whirred its way deep inside the stricken reactor’s submerged core, the images beamed from the tiny robot back to its controllers were murky and indistinct.
But the grainy film shot deep inside the Fukushima plant last week could prove vital to the future of the world’s nuclear industry.
Tiny LEDs mounted at the head of the robot, Little Sunfish, showed clumps of lava-like rock lying in layers up to 1m thick — the first pictures of the reactor’s fuel rods that melted when a magnitude 9 earthquake struck in 2011.
One day, all of this highly radioactive material will somehow have to be retrieved and cleaned up — a colossal task which is likely to take decades.
At $188 billion (£142 billion), the current estimated cost of cleaning up Fukushima is astronomical. But in truth, nobody really knows what the final bill will be — and it could be much higher.
That’s because so much will hinge on the evidence gathered by engineers — including the footage taken last week — to determine what exactly is needed to safely decontaminate the plant.
The spiralling clean-up bill at Fukushima matters because, perhaps more than anything else, it is feeding uncertainty hanging over the nuclear industry as it grapples with a profound crisis.
As Japanese engineers puzzled over their findings last week, thousands of miles away in the US state of South Carolina another nuclear plant was facing a different set of problems.
On Monday, two US utility companies behind the half-built VC Summer plant at Jenkinsville said they were abandoning the project, citing huge losses and delays.
One of them, Santee Cooper, said $4.7 billion (£3.5 billion) had already been spent on the station.
But to finish it would cost more than $7 billion (£5.3 billion) extra and would take until 2024 – five years late and more than double the original $5.1 billion budget (£3.8 billion).
Lonnie Carter, chief executive, said the project was now “uneconomical” and the firm could no longer simply keep asking customers to foot the bill.
Projects are also in trouble in Europe, where an EDF plant at Flamanville in Normandy is running six years behind schedule and costs have overrun by €7 billion (£6.2bn). Another in Finland is a decade late and over €5 billion over budget.
And then there is Hinkley Point, where construction is just getting started but EDF has already warned that costs will be £1.5 billion more than initially expected and the project could be delayed.
The current estimated bill for the British station — intended to be the first of a fleet of new UK plants — now stands at a cool £19.6 billion.
With such gigantic figures being bandied around — and the great uncertainty surrounding them — it’s no surprise that questions are being asked like never before about the commercial viability of nuclear power.
When the industry began decades ago, advocates claimed that electricity from nuclear plants would be “too cheap to meter”.
These days, the industry is struggling to win a more fundamental argument — whether it can remain competitive at all amid safety concerns and as the price of alternatives such as natural gas and renewables — continues to fall.
What does all this mean for investors?
While state-owned companies like EDF remain determined to prove that the industry can still deliver viable projects, ordinary investors could be forgiven for choosing to steer a wide berth.
In reality, the business opportunity for cleaning up or dismantling old nuclear plants looks a lot more compelling than building new ones.
The average cost of dismantling a 1 gigawatt nuclear power station is about £700 million. Decommissioning can take up to 40 years depending on whether plants are dismantled immediately or entombed for a period until radiation levels drop to more manageable levels.
And there is plenty of work to be done.
The International Energy Agency reckons that about 150 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, over one third of the world’s total, will be retired by 2040, with Europe accounting for the lion’s share — about 40 percent.
That means the global nuclear decommissioning market is expected to nearly double to £6.5 billion by 2021, from £3.6 billion last year, according to the consultancy MarketsandMarkets.
That is quite a prize — whether or not new nuclear plants are built to replace those being retired from service.
Robin Pagnamenta is Deputy Business Editor of The Times
