Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings will maintain the goal of decommissioning its disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant by 2051, a senior Tepco official in charge of the decommissioning project has said.
“There’s no need to change (the goal) at the moment,” Akira Ono, chief of Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi Decontamination & Decommissioning Engineering, said in an interview last week, ahead the 15th anniversary of the triple meltdown at the plant on Wednesday.
“Last July, we presented a specific method for large-scale debris removal at the No. 3 reactor and reported the need to take 12 to 15 years to prepare,” Ono noted. “We’re now assessing its feasibility.”
Reflecting on the crisis triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami 15 years ago, Ono said, “We’re now able to look forward and proceed with the decommissioning project. The amount of contaminated water being generated (at the Fukushima No. 1 plant) has decreased, and we have conducted trial fuel debris removal twice.”
Over the coming year, Tepco will carry out key decommissioning tasks, according to Ono. These tasks include removing rubble from the upper part of the No. 1 reactor building, starting in April; recovering nuclear fuel from the spent fuel pool at the No. 2 reactor, by June; and conducting the third trial removal of fuel debris at the No. 3 reactor, also by June.
“We plan to finish removing all fuel from each reactor’s spent fuel pool as early as 2031,” Ono said. “Regarding tasks other than full-scale debris removal, we expect to present an outlook in the early 2030s. We’ll eventually enter the stage of focusing on debris in decommissioning work.”
He suggested that removed fuel debris could be stored on the premises of the Fukushima No. 1 plant. “We’ll work promptly to secure land for debris storage by dismantling tanks becoming empty in line with the release of treated water to the sea.”
When asked about the apparent impact of the decommissioning process at the Fukushima plant on local residents’ views of the restart of Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata Prefecture, Ono said that safety is prioritized at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant.
“Our company remains committed to our responsibility to Fukushima,” Ono stressed. “We’ll proceed with the decommissioning project safely and steadily.”
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