Russian nuclear firm wins contracts to clean up Fukushima

Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom will help Japan in handling the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant (NPP) and will be engaged in the nuclear control plan, according to the company’s CEO Aleksey Likhachev.

“We have been engaged by Japan to implement the nuclear accident management plan at the Fukushima NPP. We have won two tenders and are going ahead,” Likhachev told Russia-24 news channel.

In September 2017, Rosatom’s First Deputy CEO Kirill Komarov said that Rosatom offered their Japanese counterparts assistance in cleaning up at the Fukushima NPP and in decommissioning other unsafe nuclear power plants.

READ MORE: Fukushima rice to be sold in Britain

That followed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Russia and Japan will start joint efforts to clean up after the accident.

The decommissioning of the wrecked Fukushima reactors could take several decades and cost $200 billion. Japan plans to restart 16 out of the 45 Fukushima-type reactors, while the others will be mothballed. The country intends to reduce the share of nuclear energy from 29 percent in 2011 to 21-22 percent by 2030.

The accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant occurred in March 2011 when a massive tsunami triggered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake overwhelmed the reactor cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan. It caused reactor meltdowns, releasing radiation in the most dangerous nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section