Russia Reiterates Offer to Help Clean Up Fukushima Radiation

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RIA Novosti, PUBLISHED August 29, 2013

Russia’s state-owned nuclear utility, Rosenergoatom, has reiterated an offer that the country made two years ago to help Japan clean up contamination at the disaster-hit Fukushima nuclear power plant, which has been reportedly leaking hundreds of tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

“In our globalized nuclear industry we don’t have national accidents; they are all international,” Vladimir Asmolov, Rosenergoatom’s first deputy general director, said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Last week, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) announced that it would accept international assistance in dealing with the crisis, which has been billed as the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Asmolov told Bloomberg that since Japan’s new government took power in December, bilateral cooperation talks have been “much more positive.”

Asmolov added that Russia first extended a cleanup offer soon after the March 2011 disaster, caused by a magnitude-9 earthquake and a subsequent tsunami, and that his company still “remains open to working together on this issue.”

Japan has been pumping water through the plant to cool down its melted cores and stave off a potential chain reaction. Asmolov told Bloomberg that such efforts were only a mechanism for “generating radioactive water” and that absorbents like thermoxide should be used to clean the contamination.

Hundreds of tanks were built around the plant to store the water, but TEPCO has said that the leakage occurred, apparently due to a faulty seal or valve. The Fukushima cleanup is expected to take decades.

Russia itself is no stranger to nuclear disasters. The worst-ever nuclear meltdown, at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine, took place under the Soviet Union in 1986.

Topics: NPP Fukushima Daiichi, Russia

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