On Dec. 6, The Asahi Shimbun sat down for a conversation with Toshio Nishizawa, president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the troubled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
On Dec. 6, The Asahi Shimbun sat down for a conversation with Toshio Nishizawa, president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the troubled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.Nishizawa said he was confident of achieving a cold shutdown at the stricken reactors by the end of this year. However, he was noncommittal and prudent in his remarks on TEPCO's liability for the nuclear accident and on the possibility of raising electricity rates. Excerpts of the interview follow:* * *Most of the goals stated in the road map have already been achieved, including those concerning radioactive water.We have been engaged in temperature control with a view to achieving a cold shutdown. There have not been extreme changes, so I think we can achieve the state we envision only if we carefully maintain the present state and keep it under control.But even past that point, we will still have to keep it under tight control, including water processing. It's not that we will be in a completely different world when we have passed that point. A proverb says that perseverance makes you stronger. It is essential to keep doing it in earnest.It certainly is a milestone in the sense that you will be going into a subsequent, mid- to long-term road map toward decommissioning the reactors. There will, however, be no change in our continued effort to manage water processing and keep the reactors under control in a state of a cold shutdown.(This article was written by Tetsuo Kogure and Kazumasa Takenaka.)