information about Fukushima published in English in Japanese media info publiée en anglais dans la presse japonaise
16 Mars 2017
March 12, 2017
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/editors/3/decommissioningfukushimadaiichi/
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Workers are still struggling to contain high levels of radiation and contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, as they work to decommission the facility 6 years after the disaster.
The plant is located on the Pacific coast, more than 200 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. It suffered one of the worst nuclear accidents in history after the quake and tsunami hit on March 11, 2011.
NHK World's Ayako Sasa joins anchors Aki Shibuya and Sho Beppu in the studio.
Shibuya: Ayako, can you bring us up to speed on what's gone on at the plant since the disaster?
Sasa: This is a model of the nuclear power plant. It's facing the ocean and when the tsunami hit it caused massive damage to 4 reactor buildings and facilities. Three of them were damaged by hydrogen explosions, and reactors 1, 2 and 3 suffered meltdowns. To cool the reactors, water needed to be pumped in. They're still pumping water in today, and when it goes inside, it gets contaminated.
That water is then processed and is kept in storage tanks. There are around 1,000 of them. But what to do with all that contaminated water has not been decided. What's more, there's also underground water coming down from mountains in this direction and getting inside.
Shibuya: Tokyo Electric Power Company is trying to prevent that water from getting in.
Sasa: That's right. This is where the Ice Wall comes in. Here's a look at the underground part of the plant. Water runs down from the mountains to the ocean. It seeps through cracks in the buildings and it becomes contaminated. Tons of water flood into the buildings each day.
The Japanese government and TEPCO decided to build an underground ice wall to block the water. They put long pipes into the ground and filled them with liquid coolant, which in turn freezes the soil between the pipes. The operation began last year and still isn't completed. The final part of the process needs approval and the nuclear watchdog is still studying what they think will happen when the wall is complete.
Shibuya: Of course, the goal is to decommission the crippled plant. Can you talk about that process?
Sasa: Yes. When the meltdowns happened, nuclear fuel rods inside the reactors melted. TEPCO needs to find out what happened to that molten fuel and how much there is in order to figure out how to remove it. But here's the problem. Radiation levels are still too high for workers to get inside to see the damage for themselves. Because of this, they've sent in cameras and robots instead. Last month, the latest robot was sent in to measure the temperature, radiation and take pictures. It broke down and TEPCO gave up on it.
Seeking Solutions
Yoshihito Kametani
While the picture of what's going on inside Daiichi remains murky, engineers are pushing ahead with trying to solve one of the biggest challenges. They need to invent machines that can remove the melted fuel rods.
Earlier this year, TEPCO sent cameras into the containment vessel of the No.2 reactor. An image shows a steel grating that's covered in a yellowish substance and some parts of the floor that have caved in.
The findings surprised some experts.
"I did expect to see a hole on the floor, but there are details which I didn't imagine," says Toru Ogawa, director at the Collaborative Laboratories for Advanced Decommissioning Science. "We see so much of something, sticking all over the floor. This is what I didn't expect."
But he says it's difficult to tell what it is.
TEPCO had hoped to locate melted nuclear fuel. Removing it will be the biggest hurdle in the decommissioning process, but they've admitted that they still aren't sure where it is.
"We have yet to come to any conclusion about the exact location of the melted fuel. We intend to examine the information we have collected up until now, and then we'll come up with a more detailed judgment," says Yuichi Okamura, a TEPCO official.
High radiation levels have prevented anyone from going inside the containment vessels in the reactor buildings. Researchers, including at this company in western Japan, are rushing to develop robots to help workers involved in the decommissioning.
One machine may one day enter the crippled plant is a robotic arm about 7 meters long that can be remotely controlled. Engineers have just started testing it. But there are still many challenges ahead.
"We need to carry out maintenance remotely in the event of trouble. That's one of the toughest challenges," says Kenichi Kawanishi, an official at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. "The most important thing is to find out how much and to what extent the fuel melted and spread."
TEPCO will inspect another reactor this month to try to find clues about the whereabouts of the molten fuel. They'll send a new robot with a small camera to the bottom of the containment vessel.
Beppu: As we've just heard, although research and development continue to get the answer they still haven't found the exact location of the melted fuel rods and this is after 6 years. What's the timeline looking like for TEPCO?
Sasa: Decommissioning the Daiichi plant will take decades, and the process is not only long but also complicated. The government and TEPCO are expected to decide this year on a broad outline for how to remove the melted fuel rods. Their aim is to start removing them from one of the reactors in 2021 and to complete the whole process in 30 to 40 years.
As for cost, the government says we can expect the price tag to quadruple from earlier estimates. That will bring things to about 70 billion dollars. The reason? The difficulty of the task and the lengthy period of time needed to do it. A project of this scale has never been done before.
Please click on the URL to watch the report.
March 11, 2017
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170311/p2a/00m/0na/027000c
FUKUSHIMA -- With six years having passed since the onset of the nuclear disaster at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the government's decontamination plan in this prefecture is fast approaching the end of its first phase at the end of March.
As a consequence of the decontamination project -- and the fact that radioactive material decays over time -- radiation levels in Fukushima Prefecture have declined to some extent.
However, in certain areas of the prefecture, radiation levels continue to be high, and the issue of what to do with decontamination waste still needs to be tackled. The government does plan to carry out decontamination work in the neglected "difficult-to-return" evacuation zones in fiscal 2017, but local residents are skeptical that the end is near.
To date, the Environment Ministry has carried out decontamination work in 11 municipalities across the prefecture subject to evacuation orders. However, no decontamination has been done yet in the "difficult-to-return" zones. In other municipalities, where the radiation dose is 0.23 microsieverts per hour or higher, decontamination work has been performed by the relevant local government office.
Initially, the central government-led decontamination was supposed to finish in March 2014, but this was pushed back to March 2017, owing to delays related to makeshift storage sites for contaminated soil. The Environment Ministry plans to finish its decontamination work by the end of March 2017, after which it plans to move the contaminated soil to interim storage facilities.
In areas where the central government is in charge of decontamination, "follow-up" decontamination will also take place in the event that radiation levels do not drop enough, in the hope that residents will eventually be able to return home. Conversely, there will be no follow-up in cases where decontamination is being handled by a local authority, making local residents anxious.
Nevertheless, there are a few spots where follow-up decontamination has taken place in addition to the work in the 11 municipalities overseen by the government. There are nine such spots in total, and they are all in the city of Soma. The Soma Municipal Government initially intended to conduct decontamination in about 30 locations across the city, but this was eventually reduced to nine locations, owing to radiation level-related criteria for follow-up decontamination as instructed by the Environment Ministry.
A Soma Municipal Government representative stated, "Radiation levels are particularly high in forests here, and it is unknown what the future impact of this might be. I want to have a system set up whereby decontamination can be easily conducted again in the future, as necessary." (By Hanayo Kuno, Science & Environment News Department, Kazuhisa Soneda, Fukushima Bureau, Makoto Ogawa, News Layout Center, and Yohei Kanno, Visual Group)
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