Washington (Platts)--17Apr2012/558 am EDT/958 GMT

US Senator Ron Wyden, recently returned from a tour of the wrecked Fukushima I nuclear power plant in Japan, warned on Monday that the current schedule for removing radioactive nuclear fuel from the site is risky and potentially dangerous.

In a letter to the Japanese ambassador to the US, Ichiro Fujisaki, the Oregon Democrat said that a plan by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) to remove the fuel rods from storage pools at the coastal reactor site over the next 10 years could prove disastrous.

"Loss of containment in any of these pools, especially the pool at Unit 4, which has the highest inventory of hottest fuel, could result in an even greater release of radiation than the initial incident," Wyden said.

An earthquake-triggered tsunami caused a March 2011 partial meltdown at the Fukushima I nuclear plant, which is located 250 km north of Tokyo.

In December, Tepco released a plan for removing spent fuel rods from the radioactively contaminated site beginning in 2013 and scheduled for completion by 2021.

Wyden met with workers and managers at the site on April 6, where he donned a radiation suit to tour the facilities, according to his office. Among the problems he noted was an ad hoc sea wall constructed of bags of rocks as the only protection against another tsunami for spent fuel pools.

"The scope of damage to the plants and to the surrounding area was far beyond what I expected and the scope of the challenge to the utility owner, the government of Japan, and to the people of the region are daunting," he said.

Wyden, a senior member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, also wrote letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko and Energy Secretary Steven Chu asking for details on how the Obama administration is assisting Japan in recovering from the Fukushima disaster.

Department of Energy spokeswoman Jen Stutsman said the department continues to work with the Japanese government and Tepco to support the cleanup efforts.

In addition to ongoing aerial radiation monitoring by DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency has been involved in technical workshops on radioactive waste cleanup.

"This includes an October 2011 workshop in Tokyo and a February 2012 workshop in Hanford, Washington, where experts discussed how technologies and approaches developed as part of the US environmental management program might be applied to the cleanup efforts at Fukushima," Stutsman said.

DOE's Office of Environmental Management is involved in cleaning up some of the most radioactively contaminated sites on Earth, including the Cold War-era nuclear weapons facility at the Hanford Site in Washington state.

--Derek Sands, derek_sands@platts.com

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