TOKYO: Japan’s nuclear regulator on Friday (Jul 22) formally approved a strategy to release more than a mil tonnes of handled water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear energy plant into the sea.
The plan has already been adopted from the government and recommended by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but plant owner TEPCO must nevertheless win over local areas before going ahead.
The country’s Nuclear Regulation Authority accepted TEPCO’s plan, based on a foreign ministry statement, which mentioned the government would guarantee the safety from the treated water along with the “reliability and openness of its handling”.
Cooling systems at the vegetable were overwhelmed with a tsunami triggered by a massive undersea quake on Mar 11, 2011, causing the worst nuclear accident considering that Chernobyl.
Decommissioning work is below way and likely to take around four decades, with painstaking efforts to remove smelted fuel from broken reactors among the duties ahead.
Each day, the site produces a hundred and forty cubic metres associated with contaminated water : a combination of groundwater, seawater and rainwater that seeps into the area, and water useful for cooling.
Water is filtered to remove various radionuclides and moved to storage containers, with 1 . 29 million tonnes on site already plus space expected to be depleted in around a year.
TEPCO states the treated drinking water meets national standards for radionuclide levels, except for one component, tritium, which experts say is only harmful to humans in large doses.
It plans to dilute the water to reduce tritium levels and launch it offshore more than several decades with a kilometre-long underwater pipe.