TOKYO: The UN nuclear watchdog chief arrives in Japan on Tuesday for a trip that will include his first visit to storage facilities for soil contaminated in the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
It is the fifth official visit to the country by Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The organization is monitoring the decades-long process to decommission the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which went into meltdown after being hit by a tsunami in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Workers at the wrecked plant on Japan’s northeast coast last week began dismantling wastewater storage tanks to free up space for tons of nuclear debris.
Grossi will tour the site on Wednesday, and will also be shown the contaminated soil that the government is currently discussing how to handle.
After the disaster, about 13 million cubic meters of soil and about 300,000 cubic meters of ash from the incineration of organic material was removed from the wider Fukushima region, as part of decontamination efforts.
For comparison, the Tokyo Dome arena, where US pop superstar Taylor Swift performed last year, has a capacity of 1.24 million cubic meters.
The soil is being kept at interim storage facilities, over a total area of 16 square kilometers (six square miles).
Japan plans to recycle roughly 75 percent of the removed soil — the portion found to have low radioactivity levels.
If this material is confirmed safe, authorities want to use it for civil engineering projects, including building embankments for roads and railways, the government and the IAEA say.
The remaining soil will be disposed of outside Fukushima region ahead of a 2045 deadline.
The government has said it intends to confirm the disposal site this year, with Fukushima’s regional governor reportedly urging them to come up with a plan quickly.
“Japan’s approach for recycling and disposing of soil and radioactive waste from decontamination activities... is consistent with IAEA safety standards,” the IAEA said in September in its final report on the soil issue.
The Fukushima plant was hit by a huge earthquake-triggered tsunami in March 2011 that killed 18,000 people.
The most dangerous part of the complex Fukushima plant clean-up — removing around 880 tons of radioactive fuel and rubble from three stricken reactors — has only just begun, with one tiny sample removed by a robotic claw.
During Grossi’s visit, experts from the IAEA and neighboring countries including China and South Korea will also take seawater and fish samples “to further increase the transparency” of the process of releasing treated wastewater into the sea, an official from Japan’s energy agency said.
Plant operator TEPCO in August 2023 began discharging 1.3 million tons of collected groundwater, seawater and rainwater, along with water used for cooling the reactors.
The water release has been endorsed by the IAEA, and TEPCO says all radioactive elements have been filtered out except for tritium, levels of which are within safe limits.
But countries including China and Russia have criticized the release and banned Japanese seafood imports over safety concerns.
China in September said it would “gradually resume” importing seafood from Japan but this has yet to begin.
UN nuclear chief to view soil removed from Fukushima
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UN nuclear chief to view soil removed from Fukushima
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
