Step seen as milestone in decades-long decommissioning project
The operator of the crippled Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station will start dismantling treated water tanks next week to clear space needed to store nuclear fuel debris to be extracted from the reactors.
The step is a milestone of a sort as Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) moves ahead with a decades-long project to dismantle the entire facility, which has been shut down since it was hit by a catastrophic tsunami in 2011, leading to the meltdown of three reactors.
“The company will start dismantling welded water tanks on February 13, if the weather allows,” a Tepco spokesman said.
Since the accident, Tepco has stored around 1.3 million tonnes of water – a combination of groundwater, seawater and rainwater – at the site along with water used for cooling the reactors.
The water is filtered to remove various radioactive materials, but has remained inside more than 1,000 tanks that occupy much of the facility’s ground.
After removing the tanks, Tepco plans to build facilities to store molten fuel debris to be extracted from inside the reactors.
Scrapping the water tanks became possible after Tepco began releasing the stored water from the plant into the Pacific Ocean in August 2023.
Japan has insisted that the water does not harm the environment, a position backed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
