COVID-19 delays Fukushima debris cleaning

The removal of nuclear debris from Japan’s crippled Fukushima power plant will be delayed by about a year, because the coronavirus pandemic has set back the development of specialized equipment, the plant’s operator said on Thursday.

The Tokyo Electric Power Co had been scheduled to start removing melted fuel from deep inside one of the mangled reactors next year, a decade after Japan’s worst-ever nuclear crisis was triggered by a tsunami.

The process is considered the most difficult of the massive decommissioning program, which is expected to take three to four decades to complete.

TEPCO had planned to develop a robot arm in Britain that would have arrived in Japan next year to start work — but a recent spike in COVID-19 infections resulted in its delay.