Nuclear

The owner of the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 power plant is trying this week to touch melted fuel at the bottom of the plant for the first time since the disaster almost eight years ago, a tiny but key step toward retrieving the radioactive material amid a ¥21.5 trillion ($195 billion) cleanup effort.

Radioactive cesium exceeding the state limit has been detected in fish caught off Fukushima Prefecture for the first time in about four years, the prefecture’s fisheries cooperatives association has said.

Toshiba Corp. unveiled a remote-controlled robot with tongs on Monday that it hopes will be able to probe the inside of one of the three damaged reactors at the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear plant and grip chunks of highly radioactive melted fuel.

The concentration of radioactive cesium-137, which was spread about following the accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, has been rapidly decreasing in river waters in municipalities near the facility in Fukushima Prefecture, according to a survey by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.

An alarm was triggered at a onetime nuclear fuel manufacturing facility Wednesday after radioactive substances leaked from materials that were being transferred at the facility operated by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, company officials said.

Toshiba Corp. unveiled a remote-controlled robot with tongs on Monday that it hopes will be able to probe the inside of one of the three damaged reactors at Japan’s tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear plant and grip chunks of highly radioactive melted fuel.

Japan’s strategy of promoting nuclear exports will not change following Hitachi Ltd.’s decision to suspend a nuclear power plant construction project in Britain, industry minister Hiroshige Seko said Friday.

Japan's Hitachi will take a $2.8 billion hit to profit after it decided on Thursday to freeze its flagship nuclear power project in the U.K.

Hitachi plans to put a U.K. nuclear power project on hold as negotiations with the British government over funding hit an impasse, all but closing the book on Tokyo's vision for nuclear infrastructure exports.

Supplies of uranium, used to fire nuclear power plants, are becoming increasingly plentiful globally, threatening to make redundant Japan's long-standing policy of recycling spent nuclear fuel.