Dismantlement Delays

The government of Japan revised the plan for dismantling broken First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which extended the process for three years utmost. The effort to extract used fuel rods would be delayed, due to the difficulty in decontamination of the place they remained. Additional construction for containment of radiation will be required. Situation of the plant is still unstable.

In three buildings of the plant, number 1 to 3, there are 3,033 fuel rods in cooling pools and containment vessels. Without removing those fuel rods, dismantling of the plant cannot be achieved. After the revision, the time of finishing removal in the building 3 would be delayed from the second half of FY 2015 to FY 2017. In the building 1 and 2, removal would be further extended from the second half of FY 2017 to FY 2020. Radiation in the building was too strong for the workers to make effort of removal.

Salvaging melted fuel rods is further difficult. Tokyo Electric Power Company has been planning to extract the debris, while containing radiation by soaking with water. However, TEPCO has not found where the debris is, after a China syndrome occurred in the accident. After consideration with no credible information, the revised plan introduced an option to extract it in the air, without using water. Although TEPCO has been expecting the starting time of removing the debris will be in the first half of FY 2020 in building 1 and 2, and in the second half of FY 2021 in building 3, the actual timing will be determined within two years from now.

TEPCO has a three-layered plan for the dismantlement. The first stage ended in November 2013, when they started removing used fuel rods from the building 4. The second stage would be ended with starting extracting debris. The third stage continues until the all process will be finished. It will be 2051 for the latest estimation.

For increasing contaminated water, the revised plan expected to start discussion on how to extract tritium, which could not be removed current purification device, in the first half of 2016. It is unbelievable that they still have no idea about actual technology to remove it, while a great amount of contaminated water is increasing. Who in Japan believes in the plan that they will reduce the amount of contaminated water flowing in the plant from 300 metric tons to 100 per day?

The government needs to announce how their plan is unstable and subject to change. Officials with TEPCO admit that the plan is nothing more than a desirable expectation. Seeing fiscal necessity of early return of the evacuated residents to their devastated hometown, the government is making a story that the dismantlement is proceeding, recovery effort is successfully ongoing, and people do not have to worry about radiation anymore. Obviously, such a story is a kind of fairy tale.