10 years after the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese nuclear industry is stagnating

Ten years after the Fukushima disaster, The Japanese nuclear industry remains paralyzed, because most of the country’s reactors are shut down or being dismantled.

The government still hopes to revitalize the sector, in part to reduce the country’s dependence on energy imports and also to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

About 5,000 people continue to work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant daily, where four reactors were severely damaged on March 11, 2011, due to the tsunami generated by a strong earthquake. The iron masses and reactor 1, whose roof was destroyed during the disaster, remind us of the violence of the disaster. Mobile Geiger counters keep beeping incessantly at the factory.

The surroundings of the reactors were cleaned, new cement dams were built and the fuel rods were removed intact with giant cranes. But the hardest part remains: extracting around 900 tonnes of molten fuel mixed with other highly radioactive debris. The pandemic delayed construction a special robotic arm in the UK, delaying the extraction process for a year, until 2022.

But twelve months is nothing in a process of dismantling which will take at least 30 to 40 years. Fortunately, the 7.3 magnitude earthquake that struck the region on the night of February 13 did not cause a tsunami or other damage, not even to the Fukushima plant. However, accelerated the drop in the cooling water level in several reactors, confirmed the operating company Tepco. Although the situation is under control, the group asserts, as the water is kept in a closed circuit and pumped.

Groundwater from the surrounding mountains entering underground under the reactors becoming radioactive was one of the biggest problems, but it was mitigated by the installation under the reactors of a “wall of ice” 30 meters deep and 1.5 km long. But the rain generated around 140 m3 of radioactive water per day at the plant in 2020.

This polluted water, which still contains tritium after filtration, stored in hundreds of blue, gray and cream tanks on the floor, where space is starting to run out. As for the boreal summer of 2022, there will be no more space available to continue storing it, the solution is to gradually throw it into the sea, but the government has not yet formalized this decision, which is politically very sensitive.

Only nine reactors are currently in service, compared to 54 in March 2011. A total of 24 will be dismantled. All the reactors in Japan were paralyzed after the accident, drastically strengthen national nuclear safety regulations.

Nuclear power produced 6.2% of electricity in Japan in 2019, against 30% before the accident, according to official data. The government’s current target is that by 2030, 20-22% of energy will come from a nuclear source, although many experts consider this to be impossible.

Most Japanese people are against nuclear power after the trauma of the Fukushima disaster, and communities near the power plants have filed dozens of lawsuits in an attempt to prevent them from restarting.

New national safety regulations, plant decommissioning and maintenance have driven up costs. In early 2020, the Japanese press agency Kyodo he calculated these costs at 13.4 trillion yen (about $ 129 billion, 106 billion euros). But this estimate does not include the cost of dismantling Fukushima Daiichi and decontaminating the area, which is likely to be higher.

“The future of nuclear energy is very dark”, clarified Takeo Kikkawa, energy expert and professor at the International University of Japan. At most, it will be a transitional energy since it is not planned to renew the nuclear fleet, he assures. Some Japanese companies in the sector have started investing in renewable energy, a much more profitable sector.

Last June, Tepco announced that it would invest 2 trillion yen (approximately 18,000 million dollars, 16,000 million euros) in the next 10 years to increase green power capacity, and Toshiba and Hitachi have abandoned nuclear power projects in the UK in recent years.

El Mercurio (Chile)