IAEA nuclear decontamination team to travel to Japan

Sep 26, 2011, 11:45 GMT

Vienna - A nuclear decontamination team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is to travel to Japan next month to raise the credibility of clean-up efforts around the leaking Fukushima reactors, IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said on Monday.

'Japan does not have that much experience in decontamination,' Amano told reporters in Vienna.

The country has never had to deal with clean-up efforts of that scale, he said. 'Even though they have some ideas, we can provide confidence and credibility.'

The IAEA team is tasked to gather information and will help plan the government's mitigation programme.

The government in Tokyo said this month it would spend about 220 billion yen (2.84 billion dollars) to clean up residential areas in Fukushima prefecture contaminated by radiation in the wake of the nuclear crisis.

Amano said some people had taken decontamination into their own hands by spraying their homes with water and digging up soil.

'These things need to be done properly. Otherwise the amount of debris becomes huge,' he added.

He said the international community was still focussed on the status of the damaged reactors. 'But for the local people the most important is what happens with their house or rice field.'

At a meeting of the IAEA governing board on Monday, Amano also said he plans to monitor whether countries are implementing a new global nuclear safety programme that is based on lessons learned from Fukushima.

Although the so-called action plan is non-binding and contains no time lines, Amano announced that an IAEA action team would keep tabs on efforts to boost safety, and that he would provide an initial progress report in November.

In the wake of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, IAEA member countries agreed on 12 goals, including stricter safety guidelines, more IAEA safety inspections and stress tests of all nuclear power plants.

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