Crippled tsunami reactors may work again

Tokyo — Japan may restart several reactors shut down by the Fukushima nuclear crisis in about a year, a senior regulator said in an interview on Tuesday, a day after new safety rules went into effect designed to avoid a repeat of the disaster.At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant north of Tokyo, the site of the world’s worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, the situation took a turn for the worse as radiation levels in groundwater soared, suggesting highly toxic materials seeping from the plant.

Japan is nevertheless forging ahead with attempts to restart idle reactors in the face of a sceptical public, after Fukushima highlighted weak oversight of the industry.

That is meant to change with the new rules.
Getting units restarted is a key government goal to reduce the import bill for fossil fuel to run conventional stations.

Only two of Japan’s 50 reactors are connected to the grid and operators applied to restart 10 on Monday.
“Some units are projected (to restart) a year from now, though I don’t know how many,” said Kenzo Oshima, a commissioner of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority.

“It is hard to imagine that all the applications would be rejected, but we don’t know what the outcome will be at the moment.”
Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the Fukushima station, hit by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, said that an observation well between the damaged reactor No 2 and the sea showed levels of radioactive caesium on Monday.

Tokyo Electric, also known as Tepco, said it detected caesium 150 times above Japan’s safety standard.
The reading for caesium was about 85 times higher than it had been three days earlier.

The latest findings, 25m from the sea, come a month after Tepco detected radioactive caesium in groundwater flowing into its wrecked plant far from the sea on elevated ground.

The spike, combined with recent discoveries of high levels of radioactive elements like tritium and strontium, suggest that contaminated water is spreading toward the sea side of the plant from the reactors sitting on higher ground.

The operator has been flushing water over the three reactors to keep them cool for more than two years, but contaminated water has been building up at the rate of an an Olympic-size swimming pool per week. — Reuters