Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority this week authorized operation of an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Mutsu City in the Aomori prefecture, one of the northernmost points of the largest Japanese island, Honshu, the English-language publication NHK World Japan reported.
The facility, the first of its kind in Japan, will store spent fuel for 50 years, NHK reported.
Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant retrieved a piece of melted down fuel from the core of the plant’s Unit 2 reactor, English-language Japanese media reported this week.
Japan Today on Sunday reported that cleanup personnel at the plant, where reactors melted down in 2011 following a tsunami strike, retrieved the sample via robotic arm on Tuesday. Last week, plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Holdings said in a press release the robot had collected a piece of fuel inside the melted down core and was preparing to remove it.
The fuel sample will be sent to four different off-site facilities for analysis, TEPCO wrote in a separate press release.
The German Federal Republic ruled out more than half of its own territory as a possible site for a long-term geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, a German public television station reported this week.
The German-language report, by ARD-aktuell’s Tagesschau cited a Nov. 4 interim report by Germany’s state-owned Bundesgesellschaft Für Endlagerung, Peine, Lower Saxony, Germany, as the source of the information. The company manages the country’s high-level radioactive waste and is leading the search for a permanent repository.
Germany shut down its last two nuclear power plants in 2023.
Arvil Crase, a former director of marketing and customer service manager for U.S. Ecology in the 1980s and 1990s, died Oct. 11 in Washington state from injuries sustained in a car crash. He was 86.
An obituary posted online Oct. 30 said Crase died Oct. 11. Public records from the Washington State Patrol show that Crase and his wife were involved in a crash on that same day in Eatonville, Wash. The local Tacoma News Tribune reported that Crase died from his injuries.
Peter Cole, a professor at the University of Liverpool’s Radiation Protection Office in the United Kingdom, died after a brief illness, according to an obituary posted by a fellow professor on the university’s website.
Cole joined the university in 2000, according to the obituary.
