"I am very sorry that the public doesn't trust the various disclosures the government has made about the accident," Kan told parliament. Some have criticised Kan and Tepco for failing to quickly release information about the extent of the damage at Fukushima Daiichi. Kan has already announced a comprehensive review of Japan's nuclear energy policy and ordered the temporary closure of an atomic plant in central Japan that is considered particularly vulnerable to earthquake damage.īut he is also expected to tell G8 leaders that Japan will continue to use nuclear energy after making safety improvements. The prime minister, Naoto Kan, will unveil plans at the G8 summit in Deauville, France, to require all new buildings to be fitted with solar panels by 2030, the Nikkei business newspaper said. Japan's shift towards renewable energy, meanwhile, is expected to gather momentum later this week. Tepco is working with the French nuclear engineering firm Areva to reprocess the water. The company has yet to complete a system to reprocess the water for reuse in the reactors, raising fears that contaminated liquid could leak into the sea.Ī Tepco spokesman said dealing with contaminated water that has gathered in reactor buildings and trenches could take until the end of the year, adding that the volume of water being used to cool the damaged reactors could rise to about 200,000 tonnes. On Monday, it said makeshift containers being used to store tens of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water were almost full. Tepco has suffered recent setbacks that may derail attempts to bring the plant under control in the next six to nine months, which is the deadline the firm announced just over a month ago. The UN nuclear inspectors will visit the Fukushima plant and present their findings at a meeting of ministers from IAEA member-states on 20 June. Tepco's handling of the crisis will come under closer scrutiny with the arrival in Tokyo of a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "Now people are used to the situation … nothing is resolved, but normal business has resumed in places like Tokyo."
"In the early stages of the crisis Tepco may have wanted to avoid panic," he told Reuters. Tepco said it had been unable to confirm the meltdowns until it had finished analysing data, but Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University, suggested the revelation was timed to minimise its impact on the public. Tepco officials repeated their insistence that the reactors had been crippled by the waves, but speculation has mounted in recent days that the quake itself had been responsible, casting doubt on Tepco's claims that the plant was able to withstand even the most violent seismic shifts. It said the fuel rods in the reactors 2 and 3 had started melting two to three days after the earthquake and tsunami, which knocked out vital cooling systems. "It is unlikely that the meltdowns will worsen the crisis because the melted fuel is covered in water," said a Tepco spokesman, Takeo Iwamoto. The temperature of the fuel rods, which are believed to have melted and settled at the bottom of flooded reactor pressure vessels, remained well below dangerous levels, the company said. The utility, which last week suffered the biggest annual loss by any Japanese firm outside the financial sector, said most of the melted fuel in all three reactors was covered in water and did not threaten to compound the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.