Global Security Newswire

Japan on Friday said it would deploy roughly 300 military personnel in December to remove radioactive material from a number of structures close to the damaged Fukushima Daiichi atomic facility, Kyodo News reported (see GSN, Nov. 16).

The sites -- workplaces in the neighboring jurisdictions of Namie, Tomioka and Naraha -- would host nongovernmental participants in a wider-scale decontamination effort set to start in January, Defense Minister Yasuo Ichikawa said.

The six-reactor power plant was damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people missing or dead in Japan. Radiation releases on a level not seen since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster forced the evacuation of about 80,000 residents from a 12-mile ring exclusion zone surrounding the site in Fukushima prefecture (Kyodo News I/Mainichi Daily News, Nov. 18).

Tokyo would confirm the plant to be in "cold shutdown" after authorities verify that site conditions could remain under control for the next few years, Japanese Environment Minister Goshi Hosono said on Thursday. He affirmed his hope to reach the milestone in 2011.

"There have been various discussions on whether the fuel remains inside the pressure vessels, or has dropped to the (outer) primary container ... and our explanation is that we think we are able to stably cool the fuel including that inside the primary containers and the pressure vessels," Hosono said (Kyodo News II/Mainichi Daily News, Nov. 18).

Meanwhile, Japan on Thursday prohibited rice deliveries from close to the plant following the discovery of radioactive cesium concentrations in the grain exceeding a government threshold, Agence France-Presse reported (Shingo Ito, Agence France-Presse/Google News, Nov. 17).

An independent analysis has determined that over 50 percent of radioactive contaminants released in the initial days of the Fukushima crisis have landed in the ocean, Kyodo reported on Thursday (Kyodo News III/Mainichi Daily News, Nov. 17).