$30bn for Fukushima clean-up

A Marubeni Corp handout photo of a floating electric substation off the coast of Naraha town in Fukushima prefecture that started generating power yesterday. The turbine, equipped with 80m long blades, is placed about 20km from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. It will produce up to two megawatts of electricity, said a consortium of ten Japanese companies and the University of Tokyo. The Fukushima Offshore Wind Consortium hopes the publicly-funded pilot project will help Fukushima become the centre of a renewable energy industry.Reuters/TokyoJapan’s government is finalising plans to borrow an additional 3tn yen ($30bn) to pay for compensating Fukushima evacuees and cleaning up the area outside the wrecked nuclear plant, said people with knowledge of the situation.The additional borrowing would mark both a recognition of the project’s mounting costs and the difficulty of hitting initial targets for reducing radiation levels in the towns and villages hardest hit by the fallout from the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.The new government borrowing programme would increase the amount earmarked for Fukushima-related expenses to the equivalent of just over $80bn, according to government officials with knowledge of the developing plan who asked not to be named.That $80bn excludes the cost of decommissioning Fukushima’s six reactors, a process expected to take decades.The new funding, which is being reviewed as part of the regular budget-setting process, would increase the amount earmarked for paying for work crews to decontaminate Fukushima towns and villages by about $500mn, according to the sources.The rest of the extra funding raised by the government would be used to defray the cost of creating a storage facility for the radioactive waste, including topsoil and leaves collected from the evacuated zone, and would be available to pay compensation to more than 50,000 nuclear evacuees who remain shut out of their homes more than two and a half years after a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 triggered meltdowns and explosions at the Fukushima plant.Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been considering a change of approach to the Fukushima clean-up. Lawmakers from his coalition this week urged that the government step back from the most ambitious goals for reducing radiation through a public-works style clean-up and begin paying new compensation to residents who have no prospect of returning home.Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, the owner of the Fukushima plant, remains responsible for covering the costs of compensation and paying to clean up the surrounding areas under a framework set by the previous government.But the government has issued bonds to pay the related costs up front. The embattled utility remains on the hook for paying back the money spent to the government over a period of decades under current arrangements.The additional borrowing would take the amount budgeted for decontamination to just under 2tn yen from an initial allocation of 1.5tn yen. Total government borrowing related to Fukushima would increase to 8tn yen from 5tn yen, the sources said.Japan’s Ministry of Environment has contracted work to clean up the 11 most heavily contaminated townships, with the aim of bringing the average annual radiation dose to 20 millisieverts per year, based on a range suggested by the International Centre for Radiological Protection.Current policy dictates that evacuation orders be lifted and compensation payments stopped when that level is reached. However, the government also set a lower, long-term target of 1 millisievert - twice the background radiation in Denver.The evacuation area in Fukushima is a little larger than Hong Kong. The most contaminated area was predicted to remain uninhabited for at least five years and remains off limits.Some 3.8tn yen has already been committed to pay compensation to evacuees of the 5tn yen that had been set aside. The additional borrowing framework would avoid a financing crunch for the project, the sources said.Koizumi for nuclear-free JapanFlamboyant former Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi yesterday called on his one-time protege and the nation’s current leader to abandon nuclear power as anti-atomic sentiment runs high after the Fukushima disaster. The 71-year-old has emerged as a high-profile critic of the nuclear power industry he once supported, a move that surprised Shinzo Abe’s administration which is pushing to restart Japan’s shuttered reactors. Abe was Koizumi’s right-hand man during part of the latter’s 2001-2006 tenure as prime minister. “I cannot read his mind but I hope he would move toward” going nuclear-free, the popular former premier told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. “There is no better environment for the prime minister than right now... if Prime Minister Abe decides now (to go nuclear-free), there would be few parliamentarians who would resist that plan while ordinary citizens would lend their support too.” Koizumi added that “we should go to zero now. Restarting the reactors will only result in more nuclear waste”.