Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of the nuclear disaster, will ask electric power companies to stop storing spent fuel rods inside their reactor buildings, a setup that compounded the crisis at the Fukushima plant.
Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of the nuclear disaster, will ask electric power companies to stop storing spent fuel rods inside their reactor buildings, a setup that compounded the crisis at the Fukushima plant.
“We should come up with various ways to store them,” Hosono said in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun on Jan. 14.
Spent fuel rods have primarily been stored in pools installed in buildings that house reactors at many of the nation’s nuclear power plants.
But the crisis that unfolded at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant following a blackout triggered by the March 11 quake and tsunami showed the problems with this arrangement.
After a hydrogen explosion destroyed the roof of the building housing the No. 4 reactor on March 15, the storage pool containing the radioactive spent fuel was exposed to the atmosphere. The pool contained enough spent fuel to be used in two reactors.
Spent fuel pools that are particularly vulnerable to quakes are the ones at boiling-water reactors, such as the Fukushima No. 1 plant, because they are generally placed in the upper part of the reactor buildings.
Hosono stressed the need to overhaul the way of storing spent nuclear fuel. He suggested shared storage pools built in structures separate from the reactor buildings at some nuclear plants, as well as storing the spent fuel in dry cask containers designed for that purpose.
Under the country’s current nuclear power policy, spent fuel rods are supposed to be disposed of at Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture.
But completion of the reprocessing plant has already been delayed 18 times.
The capacity of storage pools at nuclear plants across the nation is nearing the limit. Plant operators have taken stop-gap measures to temporarily expand the storage capacity when they find they have too much spent fuel on their hands.
Hosono’s call for a review of the storage method is intended to prompt plant operators to seek a more permanent solution to the matter, according to government sources.
His remarks are also meant to make it easier to gain the understanding of local governments for restarting reactors through measures to improve the safety of the storage facilities.