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.
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