TOKYO (AFP) – The United Nations (UN) nuclear watchdog chief will make his first visit this week to storage facilities for vast quantities of soil contaminated in the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Japan’s government must decide what to do with the soil – enough to fill 10 baseball stadiums – scraped from the wider Fukushima region as part of efforts to remove harmful radiation. That is on top of the monster task of decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which went into meltdown after being hit by a tsunami in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi will tour the plant today. He will also be shown some of the 13 million cubic metres of soil and 300,000 cubic metres of ash from incinerated organic material. For comparison, the capacity of the Tokyo Dome arena, where pop superstar Taylor Swift performed last year, is 1.24 million cubic metres.
Japan plans to recycle roughly 75 per cent of the removed soil – the portion found to have low radioactivity levels.
If this material is confirmed safe, authorities want to use it for building road and railway embankments among other projects.
The remaining soil will be disposed of outside the Fukushima region ahead of a 2045 deadline.
The central government has said it intends to confirm the disposal site this year, with Fukushima’s regional governor reportedly urging it to come up with a plan quickly.
