By AFP - Agence France Presse
The head of the UN monitoring body visits Fukushima as Japan switches back to nuclear power.
Caroline GARDIN
The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog visited Japan's Fukushima plant on Wednesday, a day after Tokyo approved an energy plan that marks a return to nuclear power.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is monitoring Japan's efforts to decommission the Fukushima Daiichi plant after a tsunami triggered by the 2011 earthquake killed 18,000 people and unleashed the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
When IAEA chief Rafael Grossi arrived in Japan on Tuesday, the cabinet adopted a plan to increase reliance on nuclear power to help meet the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence and microchip factories.
“At a time when Japan is embarking on a gradual return to nuclear power in its national energy mix, it is important that this is also done in complete safety and with the trust of society,” Grossi said after meeting with the foreign minister.
Japan had previously promised to “reduce dependence on nuclear energy as much as possible”.
But this promise was removed from the latest Strategic Energy Plan, which includes the intention to make renewable energy the country's main source of energy by 2040.
According to the plan, nuclear power will account for around 20% of Japan's energy supply by 2040, compared to 5.6% in 2022.
- Contaminated soil
The switch back to nuclear power comes as Japan struggles to remove around 880 tons of radioactive debris from the Fukushima Daiichi reactors.
So far, only a small sample has been recovered by a robotic gripper.
Grossi, who is making his fifth visit to Fukushima, saw for the first time the vast “provisional” storage facilities for contaminated soil near the plant.
Around 13 million cubic meters of soil - enough to fill 10 stadiums - have been removed from the area to remove harmful radiation. Around 300,000 cubic meters of ash from incinerated organic material is also being stored.
On Wednesday, AFP reporters saw trucks and construction vehicles going back and forth between various points where hundreds of large black bags full of earth were piled up, some barely covered by snow.
Japan plans to recycle around 75% of the soil - the part with low radioactivity - for construction projects, such as road and rail embankments.
The remaining material will be disposed of outside the Fukushima region before the 2045 deadline.
“In terms of the deadline, which has, of course, been set by law for 2045, we believe it is not unrealistic. It can be done,” Grossi told reporters on Wednesday.
The IAEA published its final report on soil recycling and disposal in September, saying Japan's approach was consistent with UN safety standards.
Removing topsoil was a “very effective” way of decontaminating land near waterways, said Olivier Evrard, director of research at France's Atomic Energy Commission.
But the operation was expensive, “generated a huge amount of waste and still presents fertility problems” for agriculture, he told AFP.
This contrasts with the decision to fence off a large area after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and more or less “leave it to wildlife”, Evrard said.
- Seafood ban
Experts from the IAEA and countries such as China and South Korea also took samples of seawater and fish from Fukushima on Wednesday.
This is “so that they can also verify for themselves that what we are doing is totally in line and safe,” said Grossi.
The plant's operator, TEPCO, began releasing 1.3 million tons of treated groundwater, seawater, and rainwater into the sea, along with the water used to cool the reactors, in 2023.
The release of the water is approved by the IAEA, and TEPCO claims that all the radioactive elements have been filtered out, except for tritium, the levels of which are within safe limits.
However, countries such as China and Russia have criticized the release and banned the import of Japanese seafood.
China said in September that it would “gradually resume” the import of seafood from Japan, but this has not yet begun.
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