The head of Japan’s crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant said that details of the damage inside its reactors are only beginning to be known, 12 years after it was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami, making it difficult to foresee when or how its decommissioning might be completed.
The most pressing immediate task is to safely start releasing large amounts of treated, but still radioactive water from the plant into the sea, said Akira Ono, who is plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (TEPCO) top decommissioning officer at the site.
The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami damaged cooling systems at the power plant, causing three reactors to melt and release large amounts of radiation.
Photo: AP
TEPCO has been able to stabilize the plant to the point where it can better plan a decommissioning strategy, expected to be lengthy and exceedingly challenging.
“We have to face unconceivably difficult work such as retrieving the melted debris” from inside the reactors, said Ono, who is president of TEPCO-owned Fukushima Dai-ichi Decontamination and Decommissioning Engineering Co.
Earlier this year, a remote-controlled underwater vehicle successfully collected a tiny sample from inside one of the three melted reactors — only a spoonful of about 880 tonnes of highly radioactive melted fuel and other debris that must be safely removed and stored.
The status of the debris in the primary containment chambers of reactors 1, 2 and 3 remains largely unknown, Ono said.
Removal of melted debris is set to start in Unit 2 some time after September, following a nearly two-year delay. The removal of spent fuel in Unit 1’s cooling pool is set to begin in 2027 after a 10-year delay because of the need to dismantle parts of the building damaged by hydrogen explosions.
The plant should be ready for workers to remove the melted debris from the reactors after all spent fuel is taken out of the cooling pools by 2031, Ono said.
The Japanese government is maintaining its original goal of completing the plant’s decommissioning by 2051, but some experts say that removing all of the melted fuel debris by then is impossible and suggest entombing the plant like the wrecked Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, an option that could help reduce health risks while the Fukushima plant’s radioactivity gradually decreases.
“I still consider this goal as a major guidepost,” Ono said. “We can’t say what will happen in 30 years. We can’t say, but roughly imagining the next 30 years, I believe that it is necessary to carefully and precisely build up the current plan in order to safely, steadily and quickly proceed with the decommissioning.”
However, the biggest short-term issue is the disposal of large amounts of radioactive water, he said.
Water that was used to cool the three damaged reactors has leaked into the basements of the reactor buildings, and has been collected and stored in about 1,000 tanks that cover much of the plant’s grounds.
The tanks must be removed so facilities can be built for the plant’s decommissioning, TEPCO said.
The tanks are expected to reach their capacity of 1.37 million tonnes later this year.
Most of the radioactivity can be removed from the water during treatment, but tritium cannot be separated, and low levels of some other radionuclides also remain.
The government and TEPCO say they would ensure the water’s radioactivity is far below legal limits and would dilute it with large amounts of seawater before its planned discharge into the ocean.
Local fishing communities have fiercely objected to the plan, saying their already damaged business would suffer more because of the negative image caused by the water release.
Neighboring countries, including China and South Korea, along with Pacific Island nations, have also raised safety concerns.
TEPCO plans to finish construction of the facilities needed for the water discharge in the spring and then receive safety approval from nuclear regulators.
A final inspection and report by an International Atomic Energy Agency mission are expected before the release begins.
The operator still needs to work on an “easy to understand” explanation of scientific evidence to help people understand the release, Ono said.
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