Nuke costs balloon

TOKYO: Japan’s bill for dismantling the Fukushima nuclear plant is ballooning beyond the utility’s estimate of 2 trillion yen (R262 billion).

A government study released yestersday found decommissioning the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant had already cost 80 billion yen over the past three years. The plant suffered multiple reactor meltdowns after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The ministry said the decommissioning costs will continue at several hundreds of billions of yen a year and take several decades. Japan has been struggling to clean up parts of the no-go zone. – AP