On a sunny morning last Sunday, a large group of people gathered in Tokyo in a park near the parliament and other government buildings to hear musicians stage performances powered only by solar energy. That was not, however, the main aim.

The people, numbering thousands according to media reports, were protesting against nuclear power plants in Japan in the wake of the Fukushima disaster triggered by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 three years ago.

Despite protests ever since the meltdown at the Fukushima plants, when Shinzo Abe took over as prime minister he expressed a willingness to build more nuclear reactors. In a TV interview in late December 2012, he said the new reactors would be totally different from the ones built 40 years ago at Fukushima.

All 50 of Japan’s reactors were shut for inspections in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. And Fukushima reactors are in the process of being decommissioned, something that is expected to take about three decades.

The experience that Japan expects to gain through the decommissioning of the Fukushima reactors is being eyed as a business proposition by Japan. To oversee the project, Tokyo Electric Power Co. has set up a standalone firm called the Decommissioning Company. And Japan has set up the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning or IRID.

The two organizations are drawing hundreds of funding proposals, which is not surprising considering how many nuclear power plants there are in the world that will need to be decommissioned some time.

Decommissioning a nuclear power plant involves bringing a reactor core to stable shutdown and eventually removing it for long-term storage. And no one wants to be caught unawares as Japan was when the Fukushima disaster happened. Headlines at the time were on the lines of “Japan lacks decommissioning experts for Fukushima” and others of the same ilk.

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The US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration and the Department of Energy organized a Japan-US Decommissioning and Remediation Fukushima Recovery Forum last month in Tokyo, to share experiences, expertise, and lessons learned in remediation and decommissioning.

When the core meltdown happened at Fukushima, only the US and a handful of European countries had any experience of dismantling and decommissioning nuclear reactors. So what is new that Japan can bring to the table?

Robotics technology, for example, where robots are used instead of human beings in the dismantling process, avoiding the risk of human radiation contamination.

Japan is the logical country to offer expertise in robotics technology considering that its industry employs more than half a million workers, a number that it expects to more than double in the next decade. This is the country that developed a female robot that can sashay down the catwalk.

The robotics technology being developed to probe and remove Fukushima’s melted core fuel rods could benefit ordinary decommissioning, not just severely damaged reactors, local Japanese media has reported IRID Managing Director Kazuhiro Suzuki as saying.

This is of immense use to the industry which last year explored the possibility of using a snake robot equipped with LEDs and a camera developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s biorobotics lab in the US to investigate the convoluted pipes of an abandoned nuclear plant in Austria.

Considering that there are 434 operable nuclear reactors in the world, 70 under construction, 173 planned and 310 proposed, according to the World Nuclear Association as of February 2014, it looks like Japan has the potential to develop a good business plan. All these will need to be decommissioned and if Japan is able to make this efficient and safe through using robots for dismantling, or other approaches, then the sky is the limit for the business.

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