It’s official: Japan now has four fewer nuclear reactors than it did the day before.
That’s because on April 19, one year, one month and one week after Fukushima Daiichi units 1 through 4 lost power and either melted down or blew up, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. formally announced it had taken them out of service forever, never to be restarted ever again.
JRT readers may be wondering why it took so long for this to happen. After all, by the end of March 2011, most of the fuel rods of units 1, 2 and 3 had melted, while explosions had destroyed the reactor buildings at units 1, 3 and 4. The radiation around most of those units is still so high that people can’t go inside.
Tepco says its board of directors had actually bitten the bullet and decided to decommission the units last May. But they only started on the paperwork needed in December, after the government had declared the crisis stage of the Fukushima Daiichi accident to be over.
Since this wasn’t a routine power-plant decommissioning, it took about three months for the company to confirm what the right procedure under Japan’s electric utilities law was, says Tepco spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai. Tepco submitted the paperwork on March 30 of this year, and it took effect 20 days later. Bureaucracy has now caught up with reality.
