nuclear-news

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency has announced that it will shut down a spent nuclear fuel processor in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, as the cost to prepare the facility for new regulation standards established after the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis is predicted to top 100 billion yen.

The agency reported the decommission plan of the existing nuclear fuel processor at a meeting of its reform committee held on Sept. 29.

According to the agency, the nuclear fuel processing technology that has been under development at the Tokai facility has almost been completely moved to another processing station in Aomori Prefecture operated by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.

The new regulation standards for running a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility require operators to take the same level of safety and anti-disaster measures against earthquakes and tsunami as nuclear power stations. The agency’s executive director Shigeo Nomura told the meeting that continuing the spent fuel recycling project will not be approved by the public in terms of economic rationality.

The agency will include the decommission plan in its medium-term operational policy, which comes into effect in the next fiscal year, and file a decommission plan with the Nuclear Regulation Authority as early as fiscal 2017.

The Tokai plant came into full operation in 1981. Since 2006, it had reprocessed spent nuclear fuel from the now-decommissioned converter-type nuclear reactor Fugen in Fukui Prefecture.

There are some 110 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel left in the Tokai plant, and the agency plans to commission France to treat the remaining fuel.