Too little is known about the molten fuel inside the damaged reactors of the Fukushima nuclear plant, even a decade after the disaster, to say whether its decommissioning can be finished by 2051 as planned. This is what he said last Friday Christophe Xerri, head of the IAEA Team, the UN's International Nuclear Energy Agency, which reviews progress in cleaning up the plant.
Honestly speaking, I don't know, and I don't know if anyone knows
Christophe Xerri, IAEA
Fukushima: more studies are needed, and as soon as possible.
The IAEA team urged Japan to accelerate reactor studies to gain a better long-term understanding of the decommissioning process of the Fukushima power plant.
A strong earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 destroyed cooling systems at the plant in northeastern Japan, causing three reactor meltdowns in the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Government and utility officials Japanese public hope to complete decommissioning within 30 years, while for some experts the estimate is excessively optimistic.
The biggest challenge is removing and managing highly radioactive fuel debris from the three damaged reactors, Xerri says. “There is a need to gather more information on molten fuel management and storage to know whether the plan can be completed as planned in the next 30 years,” he told reporters.
It is the fifth IAEA report on Fukushima
The uncertainty of the estimates may partly depend on the IAEA team's latest review, the fifth since the disaster. Due to coronavirus, the review was mainly conducted online. Only Xerri and one other team member physically visited the plant before compiling and submitting a report to the Japanese government.
In the report, the team notes progress in several areas since its last review in 2018. These include the removal of spent fuel from a storage pool in one of the damaged reactors. Not only that: also the decision to start discharging enormous quantities of water (still radioactive!) stored in the plant into the ocean from 2023.
There are no remediation technologies yet
Cleaning up Fukushima is a matter of the future, literally. There's more understanding of what happened, sure. On other things, however, a step forward is needed: economic resources are needed to research and develop new technologies to clean up Fukushima. Currently they are not ready, and the estimates are talking about a decade or two.
You read it right: in 10 or 20 years we will have the technology to dismantle it, then they will have to start doing it. This is truly a long-term vision, and at present we are stumbling in the dark. Government officials and the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, have not provided a clear picture of even what the plant will look like once the cleanup is complete.
In April, Japan announced it would begin releasing large quantities of treated but still radioactive water that accumulated at the plant after the accident into the sea. TEPCO announced a plan Wednesday to release the water offshore through an underground tunnel after further treating it to reduce radioactive materials to allowable levels.
