TEPCO to scrap all 4 reactors at Fukushima Daini plant over next 40 plus years

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., operator of the stricken Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant, decided Wednesday to scrap all four reactors at its Daini nuclear facility.

An aerial view of the Fukushima No.2 Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, November 22, 2016. [File Photo: IC]

The decision was made by the utility's board on Wednesday to decommission the four reactors at the facility located about 12 km south of the Daiichi plant that suffered multiple meltdowns in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster.

The decision means that all 10 of the reactors in Fukushima Prefecture will eventually be decommissioned, although the time line for securing and decommissioning the severely damaged reactors at the Daiichi plant could take many decades.

In a project expected to cost 280 billion yen (2.6 billion U.S. dollars) and take more than 40 years, TEPCO said that a storage facility will be constructed on the site to store around 10,000 units of spent nuclear fuel from the reactors.

The huge amount of spent nuclear fuel is currently being kept in storage pools.

The utility, however, has yet to confirm exactly how and where the spent nuclear fuel will be disposed.

TEPCO has been under increasing pressure from local officials to decommission the Daini plant, with Fukushima Governor Masao Uchibori among others repeatedly insisting that the embattled utility scrap the reactors.

The Daini plant was also battered by the earthquake-triggered tsunami in March 2011 that led to its key cooling functions being knocked out temporarily, but did not undergo core meltdowns as was the case at the Daiichi plant, which led to the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.