Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) on 28 April approved Tokyo Electric Power Company's (Tepco's) decommissioning plan for the four boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Daiini nuclear power plant, some 11km south of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant. The four reactors, which began operation between 1982 and 1987, were also hit by the tsunami in March 2011 which destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant. They temporarily lost reactor cooling functions, but unlike the Daiichi plant, avoided meltdowns. They have since been maintained in cold shutdown.
In July 2019, Tepco announced its decision to decommission the units following local demands for a decision on the fate of the site. Tepco submitted its decommissioning plan for Fukushima Daiini to NRA May 2020. The decommissioning process is expected to be completed by 2064. The 10,000 fuel assemblies held in the units' storage pools will be removed over 22-years and will be reprocessed. Tepco plans to construct an on-site dry cask storage facility "to systematically progress fuel removal from the spent fuel pool". About 50,000 tonnes of radioactive waste will be generated during decommissioning, the. total cost of which (excluding fuel disposal) is estimated at more than $2.5 billion.
