Fukushima’s hefty clean-up bill leaves foreign firms in cold
CLEANING up the Fukushima nuclear plant – a task predicted to cost 86 times the amount earmarked for decommissioning Japan’s first commercial reactor – is the mother of all salvage jobs. Still, foreign firms with decades of experience are seeing little of the spoils.
Safely dismantling the Japanese power plant, wrecked by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, will cost about eight trillion yen (US$68 billion), the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said Dec 9, quadrupling the previous estimate. While a contract to help clean up the facility would be a windfall for any firm with specialised technology, the lion’s share of the work has gone to local companies that designed and built most of Japan’s atomic infrastructure.
The bidding process for Fukushima contracts should be more open to foreigners as Japan has never finished decommissioning a commercial nuclear plant, let alone one that experienced a triple meltdown, according to Lake Barrett, an independent adviser at Japan’s International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning. While the Fukushima cleanup is unlike any nuclear accident in history, foreign firms that have experience decommissioning regular facilities could provide much-needed support, according to Barrett and even the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc.
“Internationally, there is a lot more decontamination and decommissioning knowledge than you have in Japan,” Barrett, a former official at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an interview in Tokyo. “I hope the Japanese contracting system improves to get this job done safely. There is this cultural resistance – it is almost like there is an isolated nuclear village still.”
An opaque bidding process plays to the heart of criticisms tabled by independent investigators, who said in a 2012 report that collusion between the government, regulators and the plant’s operator contributed to the scale of the disaster.
Of 44 subsidised projects publicly awarded by the trade and economy ministry since 2014, about 80 per cent went to the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning. The group, known as IRID, was established in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and is comprised entirely of Japanese corporations, according to the ministry’s website.
Japan’s trade and industry ministry awarded funds directly to only two foreign firms during the same period. Many of the contracts had only one or two bidders.
Of about 70 contracts awarded since the March 2011 disaster, nine have gone to foreign companies, according to an official in the ministry’s Agency of Natural Resources and Energy who asked not be named citing internal policy.
To provide opportunities for foreign companies, the ministry has created an English website for bids and also provides English information sessions to explain the contracts, the official said.
IRID’s contracts are given to its members, including Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., which have partnerships and joint ventures with foreign firms, spokesman Yoshio Haruyama said by phone. While it doesn’t directly contract work to companies overseas, IRID taps foreign experts as advisers and participates in international collaborative projects, he said.
Mitsubishi Heavy has about five or six contracts through IRID, but can’t share how many partnerships it has with foreign firms, spokesman Shimon Ikeya said by phone.
Hitachi has sub-contracts with foreign suppliers related to the Fukushima cleanup, but can’t provide details about these agreements because they aren’t public, a spokesperson said by email.
Toshiba doesn’t directly bid for ministry contracts, and instead works with IRID, company spokeswoman Yuu Takase said by e-mail. IRID, which aims to “gather knowledge and ideas from around the world” for the purpose of nuclear decommissioning and was receiving over 20 billion yen in government grants in March, doesn’t disclose how much of their funds ultimately go to foreign businesses, according to its spokesman. Barrett, its adviser, said he thinks it’s “very low,” but should ideally be five per cent to 10 per cent.
Japan’s biggest nuclear disaster isn’t void of foreign technology. Toshiba, which owns Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse Electric Co., and Hitachi, which has a joint venture with General Electric Co., are tapping American expertise. A giant crane and pulley system supplied by Toshiba to remove spent fuel from the wrecked reactors employs technology developed by Westinghouse.
“We bring in knowledge from foreign companies, organisations and specialists in order to safely decommission the reactors,” Tatsuhiro Yamagishi, spokesman for Tokyo Electric, said by e-mail. While the company can’t say the exact number of foreign firms involved in the Fukushima cleanup, companies including Paris-based Areva SA, California-based Kurion Inc. and Massachusetts-based Endeavour Robotics are engaged in work at the site, according to Yamagishi.
However, foreign firms independently securing contracts is still a tall task.
“When it comes to Japan’s nuclear industry, the bidding system is completely unclear,” said Hiroaki Koide, a former assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, in an e-mail.
“The system is designed to strengthen the profits of Japan’s nuclear village,” he added, referring to the alliance of pronuclear politicians, bureaucrats and power companies that promote reactors. — WPBloomberg
Internationally, there is a lot more decontamination and decommissioning knowledge than you have in Japan. I hope the Japanese contracting system improves to get this job done safely. Lake Barrett, a former official at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission