Japan has made big strides toward stabilizing its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant, but is now facing another crisis — what to do with all the radioactive waste the disaster created.
Goshi Hosono, the country’s nuclear crisis minister, said on Friday that Japan has yet to come up with a comprehensive plan for how to dispose of the irradiated waste that has been accumulating since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Hosono gave the assessment after the government announced a ￥900 billion (US$11.5 billion) allocation to help the cash-strapped plant operator cover the massive cost of recovery without collapsing. Officials have rejected criticism that the allocation is a bail-out, stressing that the money comes from a joint fund of plant operators, with a government contribution in zero-interest bonds that must be paid back.
The disaster, which killed nearly 20,000 people along Japan’s northeastern coastline, touched off the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, generating meltdowns, fires and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station northeast of Tokyo.
Officials say that, almost eight months later, the plant has been restored to a relatively stable condition and is leaking far less radiation than it did in the early days of crisis. They hope to achieve a “cold shutdown” — with each reactor’s temperature below 100oC) — by the end of the year.
However, Hosono, in a response to a question from The Associated Press, acknowledged on Friday that the crisis has spawned a huge amount of irradiated waste that will require new technology and creative methods to dispose of safely.
“We still don’t have a full picture of how to deal with the waste,” he said. “It would require research and development that may take years. For instance, we still need to develop technology to compress the volume of the huge amounts of waste that we cannot move around.”
Japan could be stuck with up to 45 million cubic meters of radioactive waste in Fukushima and several nearby prefectures, according to the environment ministry.
Hosono said Japan is not considering shipping out the waste for overseas processing.
The total amount of radiation released from the plant is still unknown and the impact of chronic low-dose radiation exposures in and around Fukushima is a matter of scientific debate. More than 80,000 people evacuated from their homes, and a 20km no-go zone is still enforced around the plant.
Cleaning up the area and compensating residents is expected to cost trillions of yen. Hot spots of highly localized radiation have been reported hundreds of kilometers away. Hosono said a task force has been set up to investigate them.
The ￥900 billion fund payout announced on Friday for Tokyo Electric Power Co is meant to help the operator meet its responsibilities without going bankrupt.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS