Hitachi and General Electric (GE) submitted a plan to dismantle the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant they helped build as Japanese engineers battle to contain the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.
The proposal, which also involves Exelon and Bechtel, was submitted April 8, said Yuichi Izumisawa, a Tokyo-based spokesman at Hitachi, Japan’s second-largest maker of nuclear reactors. He declined to specify details of the plan.
The Hitachi-led proposal will vie against plans from groups led by Toshiba and Areva as Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) begins preparing to clean up a nuclear disaster that’s led to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Decommissioning the reactors may take three decades and cost more than ¥1 trillion ($12 billion) to complete, engineers and analysts say.
“It’s unclear how much the contract will be worth but it’s going to be a large amount given it would take decades to complete,” said Yuichi Ishida, a Tokyo-based analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities. “This isn’t an ordinary dismantling.”
Hitachi rose 0.3 per cent to ¥401 at the midday break in Tokyo trading. The benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average declined 0.1 per cent.
Toshiba’s group, which includes Babcock & Wilcox and Shaw Group, submitted a plan on April 4 that would take 10 years or more to complete, spokesman Keisuke Ohmori said last week. Toshiba’s Westinghouse Electric, Babcock & Wilcox and Shaw were involved in the decommissioning of the Three Mile Island plant, he said. Toshiba, Japan’s largest maker of nuclear reactors, also helped build the Fukushima reactors.
Areva, the world’s biggest maker of nuclear reactors, plans to submit a proposal, Jacques Besnainou, chief executive of the Paris-based company’s US subsidiary, said this week.
Hitachi’s United States partners were also involved in the cleanup work at Three Mile Island and the 1986 Chernobyl incident, the company said on Wednesday.
At Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979, one reactor partially melted in the worst US accident, taking $973 million to repair and almost 12 years to clean up, according to a report on the World Nuclear Association’s website. More than 1,000 workers were involved in designing and conducting the cleanup operation, the report said.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (Nisa) yesterday raised the severity rating of its nuclear crisis to 7, the highest and matching the Chernobyl disaster. The accident was previously rated a 5 on the global scale, the same as the Three Mile Island meltdown.
Tepco still working on plan to end Japan nuclear crisis
The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear plant said on Wednesday it was still working on a detailed plan to end the country’s nuclear crisis a month after it began, as tests showed radiation levels in the sea near the complex had spiked.
Engineers moved a step closer to emptying highly radioactive water from one of the six crippled reactors, which would allow them to start repairing the cooling system crucial to regaining control of the reactors.
Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the latest tests showed radiation nearly doubled last week, to 23 times above legal limits, in the sea off Minamisoma city near the plant.
A series of strong aftershocks this week has rattled eastern Japan, slowing the recovery effort at the Fukushima Daiichi plant due to temporary evacuations of workers and power outages.
The beleaguered president of operator Tepco said the situation at the nuclear plant, wrecked by a 15-metre tsunami on March 11, had stabilised.
But Tepco president Masataka Shimizu said the firm was still preparing a blueprint to end the crisis, now rated on a par with the world’s worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
“As instructed by Prime Minister Kan we are working out the specific details of how to handle the situation so they can be disclosed as soon as possible,” a relaxed-looking Shimizu told a news conference in Tokyo.
