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Delays at Japan’s ill-fated nuclear plant

Delays at Japan’s ill-fated nuclear plant

By Hiroyuki Koshoji
UPI Tokyo, Japan — Japan’s Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, built to extract plutonium from the spent fuel produced in Japan’s nuclear reactors, continues to be plagued by technical difficulties that have pushed its start-up date for commercial operations to August this year.

The plant in Rokkasho in northern Japan was out of action for nine months from the end of 2007 due to problems in one of its vitrification facilities, a furnace that mixes high active liquid waste with molten glass to seal radioactive waste in glass canisters that can safely be buried in the ground.

Attempts to restart the plant failed last October as problems with the glass melting process persisted. Then in January, 150 liters of high-level liquid radioactive waste leaked from pipes in the vitrification cell, forcing Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. to postpone operations until August.

The problems at Rokkasho, especially with extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, are a blow to Japan’s nuclear fuel-cycle program,………………. According to the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, out of the 19,240 tons of total storage capacity available in Japan for spent nuclear fuel, 60 percent is already occupied. It is believed that storage capacities at Fukushima and the Tokyo Electric Power Company Inc. would be used up within two to three years.

May 21, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Japan | antinuclear, nuclear, radioactive