NFT News No.18 (January 2005)
- NFT Achieves 100th Transport of LLW(November 2003)
- Emergency Response Team Established to Strengthen Syetem for Emergency Onsite Response(March 2004)
- NFT Participates in PATRAM 2004(September 2004)
- Completion of Six Additional NFT-Type Transport Casks(September 2004)
- Cumulative Spent Fuel Transported to Rokkasho Reaches 1000 tons(October 2004)
- Operations Commence at JNFL's Cask Maintenance Facility(October 2004)
With completion of a transport on November 27 from Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, NFT notched its 100th transport of LLW (low-level radioactive waste), to the LLW Disposal Center at Rokkasyo. In the almost 11-year period since December 1992, NFT transported a total of 19,971 casks and 159,763 drums. (135,988 drums of homogeneous solidified waste and 23,864 drums of filed solidified waste. )
NFT established an emergency response team (ER Team) on March 15. As a dedicated transport company, NFT created the team to further enhance and strengthen onsite response capabilities in the unlikely event that an accident occurs during transport.
The ER Team is made up of experts in transport casks and radiation management who are selected and commissioned in advance on a yearly basis. The members of the team have been designated as the On-site Dispatch Squad for the Emergency Response Task Office. The squad will rush to the scene of an accident, as conditions require, and supervise onsite response measures.
PATRAM 2004, the fourteenth such conference, was held in Berlin over five days from Monday, September 20 to Friday, September 24 and brought together international licensing authorities, research institutes, electric power and transport companies, transport cask manufacturers and others. There were 700 participants, including 60 from Japan. NFT had four representatives led by President Kaneko. Major programs for 2004 consisted of research paper presentations, and an experiment which involved dropping an actual, large cask.
Many of the research presentations were related to transport and storage casks. They left a strong impression that the major trend going forward would be medium-term storage of spent fuel and other waste. NFT was involved in the following five presentations and sessions.
- Thirty Years Experience in Safely Transporting Nuclear Fuel
- Development of New PWR Transport Casks
- Transport of Spent Fuel
- Transport Casks for Waste
- Japanese Standards for Transport and Storage Equipment (Poster Session)
The next conference, PATRAM 2007, is scheduled to be held in the United States in three years time.
Six additional transport casks were manufactured in preparation for the future large-scale transport of spent fuel to Rokkasho. Two 14P-type casks were completed in June 2004 and the remaining four 38B-type casks were completed in September 2004 . The 14P casks will be brought to Kyushu Electric Power's Genkai Nuclear Power Station and the 38B casks to TEPCO's Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Station, where they will be added to the line-up of casks in active duty for transport to Rokkasho. This brings the total of NFT-type transport casks owned by NFT to 53.
Cumulative Spent Fuel Transported to Rokkasho Reaches 1000 Tons ( October 2004 )
With the transport on October 25 and 26 of spent fuel for Rokkasho to Mutsu-Ogawara Port, NFT reached a cumulative total of 1000 tons transported since trial transport commenced in fiscal 1998.
Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL) commenced operations in October at the Spent Fuel Cask Maintenance Facility (F3 Facility), which had been under construction since April 2000, after completing comprehensive trial operations (ehot trials'), which began on May 10, 2004.
The facility is designed to enable maintenance work on 30 NFT-type transport casks per year in preparation for future large-volume transport of spent fuel to Rokkasho. In addition to a maintenance function at the existing Spent Fuel Receiving and Storage Building, the facility is characterized by the incorporation of a new decontamination function.
NFT rents this facility from the JNFL, and conducts maintenance work on spent fuel transport casks under the facility safety management responsibility of the JNFL.