Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
5/2/2014
Sellafield Ltd. and TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Decontamination and Decommissioning Engineering Company (FDEC) entered into a co-operation agreement this week in an effort to share knowledge and know-how concerning the decommissioning of two of the most complex cleanup sites in the world. The agreement will work as an ‘operator to operator’ co-operation agreement to share knowledge, experience and skills on an on-going basis. “We have much that we can help the Japanese with initially, as the move their focus from power generation to cleaning up and decommissioning,” Sellafield Managing Director Tony Price said in a statement. “But the technical expertise of the Japanese is renowned the world over, they are experts in design and manufacturing and, judging by their past performance on everything from motorcycles to nuclear reprocessing –once they start decommissioning in earnest there will be much that they can teach us.”
TEPCO established its in-house decommissioning company earlier this year to better focus on the cleanup activities at the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster site. This agreement would help enhance the knowledge base for the Japanese who do not have much experience in terms of decommissioning. “It has been a great honor for me to visit Sellafield and to sign this agreement between our companies,” FDEC President Naohiro Masuda said in a statement. “We are now three years into the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi, and while we have made good progress our biggest challenge has been in shifting the mindset from power generation to decommissioning – working with Sellafield Ltd, who are several years ahead of us in terms of decommissioning, will help us to move forward more quickly. We also have some wisdom that we can share, we’ve made some good progress over the last three years and we look forward to working closely with Tony and his team at Sellafield.”
The agreement also appears to open channels for UK decommissioning firms to participate in the cleanup process. REACT Engineering, a West Cumbria Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) decommissioning company formed to do work at Sellafield, has already done some work at Fukushima, and other U.K. companies are looking for work as well. U.K. Member of Parliament Jaime Reed, who first announced the agreement on his website earlier in the week, sees the work being done at Sellafield as an economic opportunity. “When I make the case for Sellafield becoming an international center of nuclear excellence, and a real world leader, this is precisely the kind of initiative that will help us to achieve this ambition,” Reed said in a statement. “I’ve pushed DECC [Department of Energy and Climate Change] and government on these issues for years: we shouldn’t see Sellafield as a multi-billion pound problem. We should see the site and the challenges it represents as a multi-billion pound opportunity for West Cumbria and Britain as a whole. Local companies such as REACT are already assisting TEPCO with Fukushima operations.”
