A new company – the Recyclable Fuel Storage Company (RFS) – is being set up in Japan to build the country’s planned recyclable fuel storage centre at Mutsu in Aomori prefecture and manage the centre’s operation.
Japanese utilities Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) and the Japan Atomic Power Company (JAPC) will formally launch RFS on 21st November 2005. The utilities announced their plans on 8th November 2005 and said Tepco will provide 80% of the new company’s capital of 3 billion yen (25 million US dollars, 21 million euros) while JAPC will provide the remainder.
The creation of RFS follows the go-ahead to build the centre that was given by the governor of Aomori prefecture, Shingo Mimura, in October 2005. The centre will be the country’s first spent fuel interim storage facility [see News No. 161, 20th October 2005].
RFS will carry out work including boring and environmental investigations which are expected to take about one year to complete. That work will be followed by the start of actual construction, which will require formal approval.
The centre is expected to be operational by 2010 and will store some 4,000 tonnes of spent fuel from Tepco’s nuclear power plants and some 1,000 tonnes from JAPC’s nuclear plants. The amount of spent fuel dealt from each utility is in proportion with the utilities’ financial stakes in RFS.
The period of storage at the centre is designed to be 50 years and consideration of where to remove the spent fuel after that period will begin before the centre starts its 40th year of service.
