 Well, thank you for everyone and good morning and welcome to this special plenary session entitled Waste and Water, the Future of Decommissioning Efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. My name is David Skeen and I am the Deputy Director of the NRC's Office of International Programs and I have the distinct honor of chairing today's session. We are very fortunate to have with us today senior executives from the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation of Japan or NDF and the International Atomic Energy Agency or the IAEA to discuss the ongoing decommissioning and decontamination activities at the Fukushima Daiichi site. As some of you may know about 10 years ago I served as the Director of the NRC's Japan Lessons Learn Division following the 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that resulted in the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. I recall that even in the early days after the accident we realized that decontamination activities at the site would be a very long term effort on the order of 30 to 40 years and dealing with the large volume of contaminated water that would be generated at the site over those many years would be one of the most significant technological challenges for the government of Japan. I'm looking forward today to hearing from our panelists to get their views on the ongoing decommissioning efforts including the NDF's unprecedented efforts that are currently underway at the site and the lessons being learned that could have a significant impact on future decommissioning efforts worldwide. I am truly honored to introduce our two distinguished speakers who will share with us their respective agency's unique roles in the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning activities. We will hear first this morning from Professor Hajimu Yamana, the president of the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation of Japan. Dr. Yamana served as a professor at Kyoto University specializing in actinide chemistry and education for over 20 years before being asked to lead the NDS response to the Fukushima Daiichi accident. He has served as president of the NDS since 2015 and has devoted his efforts to safely decommissioning the facility ever since. President Yamana will address the NDS strategic planning related to decontamination and decommissioning at the Fukushima site including the technical challenges such as debris retrieval, spent fuel removal, waste management, and the associated regulatory considerations. Our second speaker is my good friend and colleague Gustavo Caruso who will discuss the IAEA's ongoing work with Japan regarding the planned release of the treated water from the Fukushima site. Gustavo has more than 40 years of experience in nuclear and radiation safety, doing regulatory inspections of nuclear installations, licensing of nuclear power plants with the Nuclear Regulatory Authority of Argentina before he joined the IAEA. In 2005 he was appointed as the head of the regulatory activity section in the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security at the IAEA and following the Fukushima accident in 2011 he was designated as the special coordinator for the IAEA action plan on nuclear safety in response to the accident and was the primary author of the report that the IAEA issued. Then in 2021 Director Caruso was selected to manage the IAEA's safety review of Japan's planned discharge into the ocean of the contaminated water that is currently being stored in 1,500 storage tanks at the Fukushima site. So following the presentations by both President Yamada and Director Caruso there will be an opportunity for audience questions and please submit any questions you have using the Q&A tab. So without further delay I will now turn to President Yamada to introduce his organization and their activities related to decommissioning of the Fukushima site. President Yamada the virtual floor is yours. Thank you Mr. Sken and hello everyone I'm Hajime Yamada joining from Japan and I'm very glad to be with you today in this special session. So firstly I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to the NRC staff for preparing for this meeting and to Chairman Hansen for giving me this precious opportunity. Before starting my speech please allow me to express my deep concern and sorrow on what is going on under war. It is as well my concern that nuclear facilities there are isolated by military force from the operator's own discretion and regulators' directions. So this is totally against our firm belief out of our experience from Fukushima Daiichi accident that most important lesson to be learned should be operators proactive responsibility for safe operation together with a completely independent guidance from the regulatory authority. So at the 11th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi let me express sincere thanks from Japan to all countries who gave support to Japan through various types of international corporations. Today I will talk about the current status and plans for the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as well as the plans for the release of tricative water into the ocean. Please note that I will refer to Fukushima Daiichi as one F for short. So can I have my slide, the first cover page? So yes, that's good. Firstly I'd like to talk about the organizational structure for one left decommissioning. For the decommissioning of nuclear legacy that requires a long period of time, a prerequisite for success is the establishment of a solid organizational and management structure. In the legal framework of Japan's nuclear power business, the Tokyo Electric Power Company TEPCO is ultimately responsible for the decommissioning of one F. On the other hand, based on the law on nuclear disaster response, the government created a nuclear emergency response headquarters and TEPCO's decommissioning has to follow the line of this administrative guidance, which is managed by METI as a leading ministry. MDF is a government affiliated corporation specially created to supervise TEPCO to fulfill its responsibility of compensation and decommissioning. It is also responsible for developing decommissioning strategies, managing decommissioning funds and overseeing TEPCO's project management. And nuclear regulatory authority NRA is responsible for ensuring the safety of one left decommissioning from a complete independent standpoint. With regard to the release of treated water into the ocean, there were several relevant ministries to address the possible occurrence of reputational impacts to the society. So next page please. The major risk sources to deal with are shown on the lower left. The two major radiological risk sources are the spent fuel stored in the storage pools in the reactor building and the fuel debris solidified inside the reactor pressure vessel and primary containment vessel. These must be retrieved from the damaged reactor building within a certain period of time and brought into a safe storage state until the time when the final end state becomes ready. One complication is the inflow of underground water into the reactor building and this results in the continuous generation of contaminated water. Similarly, there is a huge amount of low-level radioactive solid waste that requires strategic management over the future. In the upper half of this page, I show the timeline of the decommissioning defined by the government's mid and long term roadmap. Now, 11 years after the accident, we are at the end of the second phase of this table. Until now, various measures for emergency response and the stabilisation were taken to achieve the safe and stable status of today. In the second phase, we have completed about half of the spent fuel retrieval and are prepared to start fuel debris retrieval for the unit 2 as the first implementing unit. We will start the third phase from around the end of this year to complete the recovery of spent fuel and prepare for the full scale recovery of fuel debris within the first decade. The photo on the lower right shows a large remote arm that will be used for the inside investigation of the reactor vessel and for the small scale trial sampling of the fuel debris at unit 2. It is planned to start from this order. Please go ahead. Yes, recently, attention is given to the issue of the disposal of the treated water. And I have focused on this subject in my talk. Treated water is purified cooling water that was contaminated from contact with a damaged core. Let me introduce the water management system being used at one left side. Water is continuously injected into the pressure vessel to cool the damaged core and the water flows out to the turbine building. In order to reduce contaminants, this water is treated by the season removal system and reverse osmosis system to feed it back to the reactor. However, significant amount of groundwater continuously flow into the building, increasing the volume of water in this circulation loop. The excess water is taken out and treated by advanced liquid processing system, ARPS, to remove almost all radionic rise to satisfy the legitimate safety criteria for discharge to the environment. By operating ARPS system at its optimal performance of the contamination, the only remaining radionuclide in the treated water is treated. This is called ARPS-Treated Water. Due to the continuous inflow of the groundwater in the past, the amount of the treated water stored in thousands of tanks has now reached about 1.3 million cubic meters, occupying massive portions of the site. It is estimated that we will run out of the space to build additional tanks within less than two years. Through dedicated study by the government, it was concluded that it is appropriate to release the ARPS-Treated Water into the ocean, as long as the environmental safety is secured. This is a standard practice for all other nuclear facilities in the world, releasing titanium to reverse our oceans. This conclusion is widely supported by concerned experts who emphasise the importance of sustainable long-term project of decommissioning. Next slide, please. This slide shows the plan for the ocean discharge of ARPS-Treated Water. On the upper left, you can see the current storage status of the ARPS-Treated Water. 1.3 million cubic metres are stored in about 1,500 tanks, whose titanium inventory is about 780 tB. The average concentration is 60,000 B per litre. It is anticipated that about 5,000 cubic metres of treated water will be added every year. The plan to release ARPS-Treated Water into the ocean is based on keeping the amount of titanium released per year below 22 tB, which was the upper-limit licence condition for pre-accident power generation operation. The upper-limit of titanium concentration will be 1,500 B per litre, because this has been already approved and used for the release of titanium-containing groundwater to the ocean. It is just about 140th of the legally permitted criteria for titanium discharge. To ensure this low concentration, the ARPS-Treated Water will be diluted with sea water nearly 100 times before the discharge. To respond to the public concern, an undersea tunnel will be built, and the water will be discharged at 1 km offshore and depth of about 10 m. I should acknowledge that there is still a big debate and social confusion about this decision. However, we believe this decision is justified and unavoidable, because we must keep focusing on risk reduction, such as the removal of the fuel debris and moving forward on decommissioning. It is natural that there are some key points to be confirmed for this operation. There, the conformation of the sufficient removal of other radio-nucleus than titanium. The sufficient dilution of the treated water precisely analyses concentration of titanium and so on. To address these concerns, open and transparent monitoring of all systems and discharge is required to continuous and continuous ocean monitoring will be essential too. In order to confirm the correct implementation, safety regression by the NRA, as well as the supervision of the project by the NDF, disclosure of accurate information and careful explanation are important. And as will be given from Mr. Kabuso later, the independence that supervision and evaluation by IAEA is indispensable. Finally, I have to touch on the fishermen and public are very concerned about the environmental impacts and the potential for reputational damages. We fully understand these concerns, and the Japanese government is now planning to address these social impacts with various administrative measures. Go ahead please. To conclude my talk, I'd like to remind you that the decommissioning of 1F has been progressing steadily and we are making steps for the meat to long-term work, such as the field debris retriever. With the ocean release of Arp Street with water, scientific safety should be the fundamental basis for the stakeholder-involved discussion and understanding. I appreciate your further discussion and understanding on your approach, and we will be happy to provide necessary information to you. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Thank you. Well, thank you, President Yamada, for providing the RIC audience here such a comprehensive update on the NDF's activities, and I'm certainly also glad to see that the NDF has been able to continue this important mission despite the additional challenges of COVID over the last few years. And I know that that's also weighing on folks' minds as well as you do your work. As a reminder to the audience, please let enter any questions that you have for President Yamada into the question and answer chat box so that we can address those following Director Caruso's presentation. So now we will turn to Director Caruso to discuss the IEA's work with Japan that is related to the release of the Trinidad Water from the Fukushima site. So Gustavo, the virtual floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you very much. Thank you Chairman Hanson to invite the IEA myself to make this presentation in this format, online format. This month is the 11th month from the accident. That's why I wanted to recall you that the agency organized an important conference last year where Dr. Jamana and Chairman Hanson has a prominent role there and then the conference 80K of progress after Fukushima building on the lesson learned for further extended nuclear safety was a very successful one and we are making way working with the proceedings at this moment that will be ready soon for the public consumption. Back to my first slide, please could you move on? The presentation, we have some outlined the background, the focus of the IEA review and scope, the standards that we are going to use, the task force that was stated, components of our review and different aspects regarding the recent progress and the looping ahead. Next, please. In April 2021, the IEA and the government of Japan make an agreement of this based on the government announcement from Japan about the basic policy for handling the Alps 3D water store at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. And in this agreement, we discuss the how to make the review of the implementation plan, activities all related to the charge of the Alps water that Dr. Jamana just explained before at the Fukushima nuclear power plants against the international safety standards. And this is basically inconsistent with our totally in line with our statutory functions to provide the application of these international standards at the request of the parties on this case of the Member State. I wanted to clarify that this is not an inspection, this is not, we are not replacing any regulatory job, we're just going to fulfill the international work just to compare and to see the compliance with all the international standard that approved by all Member States in this particular case of altitude water discharge. This review will be a focus on the, it's a long range review before the water will be discharged during the discharge of the water that will last some decades. And after they complete the discharge of water to the sea. Therefore, our main activity was how to ensure safety and transparency that are mainly key concepts of the review in order to contribute to the confidence building. Next please. Then the scope, basically the scope we will focus basically the mission is focused to the government in Japan, however there are different players in this case. In one side is Meti Tepco, basically the responsible organization to prepare the application and to see how the technical compliance with the safety standard. And the other side is the regulatory body that we will also be part of our review in assessing and reviewing the standards, inspecting the application and issuing the organizations in compliance with our standard as well. Therefore, with these two we complete the picture and also the focus that basically we will be, as I said, near term, mid term and long term. That's why we have to prepare all our schedule considering this long range of this particular review. We will use the standards of course as a benchmark and the conclusions, of course, will be based on the compliance or comments from using this standard as a reference level. Next please. Then here you can see a number of standards that these are the key ones, in particular starting from the BEXY safety standard we call GSR Part 3. These are the standards for radiation protection and safety radiation sources and this is the requirement. But initially we are considering the safety fundamentals, safety principles that is the governing overarching requirements for all activities, all the safety standards that are below that. And also the number of guides, number of guides that are related to the environmental and search monitoring, the radiation protection to the public environment, occupational radiation protection, radiation protection, control of the radioactivity charges and prospective biological environmental impact assessment. This is one of the key ones. Next please. To do this work, the director general directed the establishment of the task force as a primary tool to implement all the work that we have to do, including 11 international recognized experts in different fields in this particular topics in order to be sure that we have the international expertise needed in order to do this work. They were appointed by the BEXY and in addition to that we have a number of staff of the IEA that has the background on this topic to join us and then we complete what we call the task force on this project. Next please. The task force basically will serve the secretariat as the leading component and they will be chaired by the IEA. Personally I am the chair of the task force and the objective of the secretariat is providing planning, coordination and implementing all the review and missions. We will provide the necessary expertise. We will produce the necessary reports, compiling information, drafting the text and of course be the liaison with any other necessary senior official in the government of Japan and members of any other relevant stakeholders. The international experts of course have the advisory role, important role to the secretariat to perform the function, basically review the information, highlight the relevant key aspect, attend the missions, participate with us in the missions, attend the task force experts meetings and of course participate in different activities applied by the IEA. Next please. In summary this review will consider three important components. The first is the safety assessment where we include all the technical radiation aspects that are considered for the plan and supporting this activity. In particular considerations such as how to how to make the radiological characterization of the water, the safety related aspect of the of the engineering of the implementation of the system to discharge the water, the occupation and radiation protection exposure, basically the dose is to the workers and the radiological environmental impact assessment. The regulatory activities, the other important components is the review, what are the regulatory actions are considered to do and the processes that the regulator, the Japanese regulator are planning to do in this project, the safety objective, what are the most important requirements that from the Japanese regulator has in place, which regulatory assessment they are performing and the inspections and inspection program, the oversight program planned by the by the NIA in Japan and the last but not least is the independent sampling analysis, what we call normally corroboration aspects. We in our project the IEA will make the corroboration of all sampling water in particular two things, one is the system water, what how to characterize independently from the IEA for our laboratories, what is the composition isotopic composition of the tanks and how to characterize the environmental samples that composed by by sediments for the water, by sea weed and fish and these are made in the IEA by three laboratories, we have three laboratories, one at the IEA we call isotopic hydrology, laboratory with another one in Seiswerdorf is outside Vienna and this laboratory, the terrestrial laboratory and the Monaco in Monaco we have a laboratory for environmental monitoring, the three laboratories together we are making independent analysis but not only that we are going to involve third-party laboratories from other countries to again corroborate our independent measurement. Next please, the outputs, what are the outputs of our program, in this particular we will have many components which will be a draw through the years through several years and in multiple ways for example we created just an important website with public domain, we are producing reports in different topics in particular from missions, we are giving briefings to the board, to member states and on particular requests and making presentations like for example this one at RIK, the reports will be issued periodically to update all what all the work that we are doing with different components of the dimension, with the three components of the dimension before and prior the beginning of the charge we plan to make summary report with our statements about the compliance of the evaluation of the compliance of the international standard with all processes and activities that the plan is doing. This the secretariat of course will provide it in timely the briefings necessary to get to get a clear understanding what they were done and what are our conclusions. This is before the water discharge, after that we will have another program how to continue for a number of decades about this monitoring aspect to be and informed to the relevant stakeholders. Next please, what we did until now is basically just to summarize the government of Japan and TEPCO providing information on the ongoing review for example in November 2021 the environmental impact assessment in January the implementation plan, the entire project implementation plan and February we received the self-evaluation of how Japan believes that they are in compliance or what are the ongoing work in order to achieve the goal of compliance with international standards. We have several meetings with the task force since last year since September to review different steps of this process and in February 2022 we have a very important mission that basically was divided in three parts. One we went there with the three laboratories representatives to Japan to discuss how we are going to make the collaboration plan. Second we made the first mission to TEPCO METI in order to review the one of the components as I mentioned the safety assessment including the radiation aspects and the last was the preparatory meeting of the regulatory mission that is going to be taken to take place in March. Next please. Then we made the first mission as I said to TEPCO. It's the first in the process more than one but it's the initial mission to get the awareness of the situation visit the place discussing with the technical people asking questions for clear in order to towards a comprehensive understanding of all the topics included to be part of the compliance of the standards. This mission will take several experts like 15 members and from the task force in general outside members inside members and we will cover as I said a wide range of topics. Next please. Then if I if you focus on we mainly focus on eight technical areas the we made we discussed the overarching requirements that needs to be fulfilled. What are the the main elements for the characterization of the system? What discussing about the nucleates that are intervene in this process in different storage tanks? We discussed different safety related aspects regarding the process and the reliability of the process how the the engineering is going to is going to take place at the site in order to review what are the different situations including any contingency plans for if something was wrong or going wrong. What are the backup situation? How what are the safety systems that will cope with the situation something wrong? The other topic was the environmental impact assessment we discussed all topics since what is the impact in the environment those limit and constraints source and environmental monitoring programs because another thing is in addition to our collaboration we are going to review how they're making themselves the monitoring program for the source term and the environmental and the environmental samples and how Japan is getting close and giving information to the interesting parties or stakeholders for all this work and of course an additional last but not least we discussed the occupational radiation protection it means that the IEA will also corroborate the doses to the staff involved in this activity. Early results as I said we are working at this moment in the different elements collected in Japan and we are going to produce a report in the couple of months to identify several topics that we discussed and how to continue because as I said before the water we released the ongoing dialogue that that we are doing with Japan. Japan is working in different material and documents evaluations that we discussed to be to be done and then as I said this report will consider all these things and will be released end of April optimistically, realistically probably the first week of May. Next please. In the in the future I mean where we go I mean we as I said this month another mission that we are going to have is the first regulatory review about how NRA is making the set regulating the safety case of the alb city water discharge in and then we as the same case of TEPCO METI we also will make a report after this mission in the couple of months after the mission in end of May and then we have we have plans for the second half of the year to to have the other missions the continuation from the second mission for the TEPCO METI and the regulatory authority including inspection programs and further developments that appear we need to discuss related to the the prior to discharge the water 2023 is is the plan year or the water will be discharged the agency who are very very dynamic time at the 2023 in particular because we need to issue a final report of our views before the water will be charged with the with the three volumes of the safety assessment the regulatory review and the corroboration assessment including the summary easily easily understandable the summary for all people without nuclear background and of course we will continue the implementing the process for independent sampling and we have to prepare in 2023 our program for during the process during the process means that after the water started to be discharged at the sea then in 2024 long-term monitoring will continue under the current consideration and all discuss all that will be discussed with the all relevant stakeholders uh David chairman this is what I have to to tell you um I hope that uh that was clear and thank you again for giving us this opportunity for giving this presentation thank you yeah well thank you very much Gustavo I really appreciate the comprehensive presentation that you provided I know that at least here at the NRC we will be following the work of your task force as you go forward and we certainly look forward to continue to engage with the IEA and the NDF on on this topic so we've got about five minutes for questions and I've got several questions coming in I think the the the the biggest ones that we're getting right now have to deal with uh dealing with uh the stakeholders right so uh I think uh I guess probably for Dr. Yamano first can you talk about some of the approaches that you have had in in uh consulting with your uh the public and the stakeholders in Japan uh and any of the challenges that you might have uh faced in your engagements with the public in what were the lessons learned from from those engagements so you're on mute Dr. Yamano okay sorry uh yes uh thank you actually there has been a significant distrust to TEPCO and this content on the less frequent accessibility to the decision making process in the government this is people's opinion so uh public engagement is absolutely important and this is actually uh very important in the case of Fukushima Daiichi so for communication with the stakeholders Japanese government has periodically had formal opportunity to discuss about the progress and plan of the decommissioning including the water issue uh with the leaders of the municipalities and some representatives of the relevant fields in the suffered area on the other hand NRA has had the frequent meeting to discuss about the safety of the decommissioning work with TEPCO in which NRA commissioners and some opinion leaders debate the safety issues this meeting is opened by internet streaming so there have been some other opportunities to have direct dialogue with the public like uh international forum which is held by my organization but uh I'd say that the the chance of the direct dialogue to the public was not so sufficient in the past so I myself think that we need to expand this opportunity to talk directly to the public I mean the involvement of the stakeholders should be expanded more so that is my view okay now thank you very much for that and sir I appreciate it and I know certainly the more you open and transparent you can be on the plans and as the process moves forward sometimes it's difficult to to go through but it is important to keep the public informed as the activities proceed and I know certainly Gustavo and IEA will make all of their information public so having them monitor and provide that to the public is also very helpful so let me give you one Gustavo real quick from your presentation folks seem to say that uh while the the review process on the proposed release uh it is you laid out a pretty good plan as to where we are where we're going to be in the next couple years but long term how do you see the IEA monitoring the process and and just give us some of some of those perspectives on the project going forward well thank you thank you thank you for the question thank you David I think well as I said we we we have a very different milestones our first milestone is to to produce the to to show in what extent to what extent Japan is fully in line with the standards this will be done next year let's say before the water will be discharged and then everybody has the opportunity to see our evaluation totally dependent uh evaluation then then some discussions probably uh Japan will use this with the with the own stakeholders for this for this particular with this particular results after that in the as I said in 2023 we need to prepare our own program how we're going to first the transition moment what I call is the moment that the all work preparations and imminently opening of the valves will will happen then the agency will be present for for the time and then after that of course we will continue to be present to to as part of our our let's say review and and and and witnessing let's say of all the all the activities in line with the with the standards and after that as I said in 2023 we have to prepare the the steady state program how we're going to to monitor and first of all corroborate what is in the sea what is in the tanks in the routine manner with our laboratories and then how we how we are going to take into account the task for discussions what's going on if of course our our discussion is basically meant of any particular and small deviation if any we are going we are prepared to discuss first among us then with the Japanese colleagues in order to be sure that we are in the same page therefore we're fully prepared to design programs as you know this house our the IEA has enough experience on these particular projects and then we we have we are prepared to design a program to to support to and to demonstrate basically a science-based approach a transparency and this will contribute all together to the to to building confidence that that the world that that we are doing well thank you Gustavo I appreciate the response on that and and unfortunately we've reached the end of our time today so I'm going to have to conclude this special plenary session but I want to thank our two distinguished panelists President Yamada and Director Caruso for taking time out of their very busy schedules to participate in this session with us today I also greatly appreciate all of the audience for joining us virtually I'm sure that having the audience hear these types of conversations is is very helpful and educational for them so if if there are no other questions or thoughts thank you everyone for participating today and I thank the RIC audience and this closes out our session thank you