nuclear-news

” Tokyo Electric has determined that it will cease use of AREVA’s decontamination system, which uses chemicals to remove radioactive materials from water, as it has not lived up to expectations since it was installed. The utility will file an application with the Nuclear Regulation Authority in order to scrap the system.

The decontamination system was set up in June 2011, three months after the onset of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The design was so complicated that it took 50 welders more than a month to put the system together. In the first three months, the system processed 76,000 tons of contaminated water, but was repeatedly forced to be shut down by a variety of problems.

For the last three years the system has been unused and kept out of operations and in the meantime, TEPCO has introduced a new system to process the ever-accumulating amounts of contaminated water…