A total of 880 metric tons of hazardous material – a mixture of melted nuclear fuel and reactor structures – still remain inside the Fukushima plant.<\/p>\n
Removing this debris from the reactors is seen as the biggest challenge towards safely decommissioning the plant. <\/p>\n
Tens of thousands of workers will be needed over the next 30 to 40 years to safely remove nuclear waste, fuel rods and more than one million tons of radioactive water still being kept at the site. The clean-up is also estimated to cost around 21.5tr yen ($145bn; 3109bn). <\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Tepco said the start of full-scale removal of melted fuel debris would be pushed back until 2037 or later – saying that preparations for this would require at least 12-15 years. <\/p>\n
The plan has already been delayed numerous times, and the latest delay is a major setback to a government plan to complete decommissioning by 2051.<\/p>\n
Tepco still maintains that it can achieve this but some experts have called this into question.<\/p>\n
“Who really believes all 880 tons of debris can be removed in 14 years between 2037 and 2051? Maintaining an unrealistic goal is not good when considering Fukushima’s recovery,” Shunji Matsuoka, a professor of environmental economics and policy studies at Waseda University, had told local news outlet Asahi.<\/p>\n
And then there’s the issue of water. <\/p>\n
Since the disaster, power plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) has been pumping in water to cool down the reactors’ fuel rods. This means every day the plant produces contaminated water, which is stored in more than 1,000 tanks, enough to fill more than 500 Olympic swimming pools. <\/p>\n
But Japan needs the land occupied by the tanks to build new facilities to safely decommission the plant – and in 2023, it began releasing some of this treated wastewater into the ocean. <\/p>\n
The plan was met by a huge amount of criticism and controversy, despite the UN’s atomic regulators saying it will have a “negligible” impact on people and the environment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A total of 880 metric tons of hazardous material – a mixture of melted nuclear fuel and reactor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-304557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114943580205888425","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}