TEPCO and Sellafield Finalize Knowledge Agreement

The Tokyo Electric Power Company and the United Kingdom’s Sellafield Ltd. officially signed an agreement to share knowledge and lessons-learned on long-term decommissioning work, TEPCO announced yesterday. The two sides announced the agreement in principle earlier this year, but now the agreement is official. Sellafield will help TEPCO at its Fukushima Daii-chi Power Station in four areas: Site management, environmental monitoring, radiation protection, and project delivery and design engineering. TEPCO will also contribute its experience to the Sellafield site. “There are a lot of things we can learn from each other,” the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority CEO John Clarke said in a statement. “There are some clever technologies used in Sellafield, some of which I think are potentially useful at Fukushima, and equally clever technology at Fukushima that might be useful for Sellafield. But I think more than that, it’s the ways of using technology and sometimes using quite simple technology in a different way to make the progress that is needed. I think the real benefit of the cooperation agreement is sharing experiences.”