The Nuclear Wakhef of the UN arrives in Japan on Tuesday for a trip with his first visit to storage facilities for soil that is polluted in the disaster in Fukushima 2011.
It is the fifth official visit to the country by Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The organization follows the decades -long process to dismantle the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which went into the melting after being hit by a tsunami in the worst nuclear disaster since Tshernobyl.
Employees at the destroyed factory on the Japanese northeast coast Last week, waste water storage tanks started to dismantle to free up space for tons of nuclear rubble.
Grossi will visit the site on Wednesday and will also be shown the polluted soil that the government is currently discussing how to deal.
After the disaster, approximately 13 million cubic meters of land and about 300,000 cubic meters of axle were removed from the burning of organic material from the wider region of Fukushima, as part of the decontamination efforts.
For comparison: the Tokyo Dome Arena, where the American pop -super star Taylor Swift played last year, has a capacity of 1.24 million cubic meters.
The land is held in interim storage facilities, over a total area of 16 square kilometers (six square miles).
Japan is planning to recycle around 75 percent of the removed soil – the part that has low radioactivity levels.
If this material is securely confirmed, authorities want to use it for civil technical projects, including the construction of dike for roads and railways, the government and the IAEA say.
The remaining soil will be removed outside the Fukushima region prior to a Deadline of 2045.
The government has said that it is planning to confirm the removal site this year, whereby the regional governor of Fukushima reportedly encourages a plan to come up with quickly.
“Japan's approach for recycling and removing soil and radioactive waste from disinfecting activities … is consistent with the IAEA security standards,” the IAEA said in September in its final report on the soil problem.
The Fukushima factory was hit by a huge tsunami caused by earthquakes in March 2011, killing 18,000 people.
The most dangerous part of the complex Fukushima factory cleaning the removal of approximately 880 tonnes of radioactive fuel and debris from three affected reactors is just started, with a small sample removed by a robot-like claw.
During the visit of Grossi, experts from the IAEA and neighboring countries, including China and South Korea, will also take seawater and fish samples “to further increase transparency” of the process of releasing treated waste water in the sea, said one Civil servant of the Japanese energy agency.
Plant sex operator Tepco In August 2023, 1.3 million tonnes of collected groundwater, seawater and rainwater started to discharge, together with water used for cooling the reactors.
The water delivery has been approved by the IAEA and Tepco says that all radioactive elements have been filtered out, except for Tritium, of which levels are within safe limits.
But countries such as China and Russia have criticized the release and have banned the import of Japanese seafood on safety problems.
China said in September that it would “gradually resume” from importing seafood from Japan, but this still has to begin.
KH/KAF/LB
