Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has granted an operating license for an off-site interim dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Mutsu, Aomori prefecture. It is the first such facility in Japan for the temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel.
The Recyclable Fuel Storage Centre (RFSC) has been completed by the Recyclable-Fuel Storage Company (RFS). RFS is a joint venture of utilities Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and Japan Atomic Power Company (JAPC).
TEPCO and JAPC formed RFS in November of 2005 and in March of 2007 it applied to the Japanese government for a license to build the facility. In August of 2010, the joint venture announced that it had obtained the approval of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for the design and construction of the RFSC. A groundbreaking ceremony for the RFSC facility was held that same month.
Construction work on the first storage building was completed in August of 2013. In December of 2013, new safety standards for nuclear fuel cycle facilities based on the lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi accident were introduced by Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA). As a result, the RFS was directed to conduct further assessments for the facility’s ability to withstand earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes and tornadoes. The company submitted its initial design and construction program document to the NRA in March of 2016. The regulator approved its safety plans for the facility on the 11th of November 2020.
The RFSC facility will store the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the utilities’ boiling water and pressurized water reactors in dry storage casks for up to fifty years until they are reprocessed at the Rokkasho plant which is under construction about thirty miles away. A mixture of recovered uranium and plutonium oxides would then be recycled into fresh mixed-oxide nuclear fuel at the J-MOX nuclear fuel manufacturing plant near Rokkasho.
The RFSC was originally expected to start operating in July of 2012 with an initial capacity of three thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel. The RFS plans to later increase this capacity to five thousand tons. RFS submitted an application to the NRA for a pre-use confirmation of the RFSC on 10th of February 2022.
Today, the NRA said, “It was confirmed that the pre-operation operator inspection was properly conducted, and that the construction was carried out in accordance with the approval of the design and construction plan and conformed to the technical standards.” The NRA accordingly issued a pre-use confirmation certificate to RFS which enables the operation of the facility to begin.
TEPCO said in a statement, “We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the people of Aomori Prefecture, including Mutsu City, for their great understanding and cooperation since Mutsu City requested us to conduct a site feasibility study in 2000 and then invited us to host the facility. We believe that the interim storage business for spent fuel is important and effective from the perspective of expanding the storage capacity of spent fuel, providing flexibility to the operation of the entire nuclear fuel cycle, and contributing to medium- to long-term energy security.”
TEPCO added that “We will continue to support RFS so that they can proceed with their interim storage business with safety as their top priority.”
On 26th of September of this year, TEPCO announced that sixty-nine spent nuclear fuel assemblies from unit 4 of its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture had been transported to the Recyclable Fuel Storage Centre.