TOKYO (AFP) – A team of specialists from the UN atomic watchdog arrived in Japan on Monday to join other international experts investigating Japan's nuclear crisis.
A six-strong delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) flew to Tokyo's Narita airport from Vienna in preparation for a fact-finding mission from May 24 to June 2.
In all, a 20-member mission will compile a report on the emergency to be presented to IAEA member states next month at a ministerial-level conference in Vienna.
Tokyo has said the IAEA team is likely to visit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 and has leaked high levels of radiation into the environment.
But Jim Lyons, director of the IAEA's division of nuclear installation safety, said the itinerary was not finalised.
"We are going to be mostly in Tokyo but I think we're going to try to visit the site," Lyons told reporters ahead of their departure from Vienna. "That's the plan."
Asked which other sites the experts would visit, he replied: "I don't know. There are a lot of negotiations going on to determine where we can go."
The IAEA announced last week the mission, headed by Mike Weightman, chief inspector of nuclear installations in Britain, would comprise 20 experts from 12 different countries.
Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), which runs the power plant, forecast later in the day that the planned construction of a system to treat radioactive water from the reactors was unlikely to be completed until mid-June.
TEPCO has asked French nuclear group Areva to set up the system, which is designed to remove radioactive particles from the water and is a key step to repairing cooling systems and preventing further leakage of radioactive water.
Contaminated water has spilled into the Pacific while engineers have been battling to bring the plant into stable "cold shutdown", which is expected to happen some time between October and January.
