Rafael Grossi, the UN nuclear watchdog’s leader, came in Japan on Tuesday to present a study of Tokyo’s intentions to discharge treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will see Japan’s prime minister and foreign minister in Tokyo on Tuesday before traveling to Fukushima to inspect the damaged plant on Wednesday.
After cooling systems were overloaded by a large tsunami in 2011, several of the nuclear facility’s reactors melted down.
The resulting nuclear disaster was the worst since Chernobyl, and the cleanup took more than a decade, with most locations that had been deemed off-limits due to radioactivity now reopened.
The plant’s decommissioning will take decades, but TEPCO, the facility’s operator, is dealing with the immediate problem of more than 1.33 million cubic meters of water stored on the site.
The water is a mix of groundwater, rain that seeps into the area, and cooling water.
TEPCO claims that the facility removes practically all radionuclides except tritium, which is widely found in waste water discharged into the sea by nuclear facilities around the world.
Japan intends to dilute the cleaned water and release it over decades via a pipe reaching about a kilometer from the plant’s location on the eastern coast.
The IAEA has already approved the proposal, but the government has stated that the release will begin only after a “comprehensive review” that Grossi will give on Tuesday.
