Kanden\u2019s Spent Fuel Building up, Plans to Ship it to France<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Federation of Electric Power Companies and Kansai Electric Power Co. (Kanden) announced on February 12 that they would double the amount of spent nuclear fuel that they plan to ship to France to about 200 tons per shipment, for about 400 tons in total.<\/p>\n
The Federation of Electric Power Companies (FEPC) announced in June 2023 that it will conduct a demonstration study in France with the aim of early establishment of reprocessing technology for spent MOX fuel. The 11 companies that own nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Japan will be the main operators of the demonstration study, and the relevant technology will be outsourced to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) and Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL), while reprocessing work will be once again outsourced to Orano SA in France. At that time, the plan was to ship about 200 tons of spent fuel from Kanden. That was to consist of about 10 tons of spent MOX fuel and about 190 tons of spent uranium fuel, with plans to mix and reprocess them. The amount has been doubled now, such that it amounts to about 20 tons of spent MOX fuel and about 380 tons of spent uranium fuel.<\/p>\n
The reason for this, explains FEPC, is that \u201cFrom the standpoint of optimizing the actual reprocessing operations by Orano in France, who in the course of their discussions have confirmed detailed specifications of the spent MOX fuel owned by Kanden, there was a proposal to increase the quantity of material for empirical research so as to enhance the amount of data acquired, given the nature and characteristics of the spent MOX fuel.\u201d In fact, however, it is thought really to be a measure for dealing with Kanden\u2019s spent fuel. Kanden has repeatedly broken its promises to deliver that to interim storage facilities outside Fukui Prefecture. In October 2023, it provided the prefecture a \u201croadmap for spent fuel measures,\u201d which included removal of about 200 tons of it to France, but the first countermeasure listed was transference of the spent fuel to the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant. This was deemed ineffective due to postponement of the plant\u2019s completion. So, they presented a new roadmap to the prefecture on February 13, 2025, which included the doubled amount to be shipped to France. This new roadmap also anticipates the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant beginning to accept spent fuel starting from 2028, and many in the prefectural assembly are voicing doubts over the plan\u2019s effectiveness, but the governor has accepted it.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nFukui Prefecture Promoting Nuclear Recycling Enterprise<\/strong><\/p>\nFukui Prefecture announced its initial budget proposal for FY2025 on February 14. In it, 1.02 billion yen (a 51% capital investment) was allocated to establishing a new enterprise to engage in a \u201cnuclear recycling business promotion project.\u201d The enterprise will collect iron and stainless steel scrap metal from the NPPs in the prefecture and in one consolidated location perform sorting, decontamination, cutting and radioactivity measurement. Japan\u2019s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) will work on the behalf of the electric power companies to carry out treatment of the materials that emerge until they can be recognized as \u201ccleared materials.\u201d The biggest problem is that in the past materials confirmed as cleared through verification were freed from legal restrictions and sent out to be melted down, while the new company will melt the materials down first, then take samples to measure and verify the level of radioactivity.<\/p>\n
The cities and towns where NPPs are located will invest about 380 million yen (19%) into this new enterprise, along with the prefecture\u2019s investment (51%, as noted above), and private businesses such as Kanden and Japan Atomic Power Co. (JAPC) will invest about 600 million (30%). These two companies have announced that they will dispatch personnel to the new enterprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 Strategic Energy Plan and Other Cabinet Decisions Japan\u2019s government adopted the 7th Strategic Energy Plan on February 18 together with the GX2040 Vision and Plan for Global Warming Countermeasures in cabinet decisions. \u201cGX\u201d...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,40,6,30,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-international","category-news","category-nfc","category-rw"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8299"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8317,"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8299\/revisions\/8317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cnic.jp\/english\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}