Japanese nuclear scientists are to plan for future Fukushima-style incidents – by staging a controlled meltdown later this year.
The country’s atomic energy agency confirmed it was to use a scaled-down version of a nuclear reactor which they would deliberately cause to malfunction in a bid to understand how to deal with future crises.
The project will take place in a research centre near Tokyo during the spring, the agency said.
“We want to study exactly how meltdowns happen and apply what we will learn to help improve ways to deal with severe accidents in the future,” a spokesman for the agency said.
The study will not analyse how the 2011 Fukushima accident occurred, the agency said.
The Fukushima plant has continued to give concern since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami damaged the cooling system and caused a meltdown.
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