The government has restarted work to select final disposal sites for highly contaminated radioactive waste from spent nuclear fuel at atomic power plants nationwide. In an effort to stoke interest, the government has decided to conduct a series of public symposiums in nine cities. Seminars for municipalities are also planned for June. The move comes as the government shifted its basic policy for final disposal sites Friday for the first time in seven years by deciding to assume a leading role in the selection process. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan (NUMO) had been tasked since 2002 with finding municipalities willing to host the final disposal sites, but little progress was made. Currently, some 17,000 tons of spent fuel from nuclear plants across the country are stored in pools at the plants themselves and in a storage facility at the reprocessing plant built in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture. With the government and utilities pushing to restart idled nuclear plants, that total is likely to rise. An expert panel of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is compiling selection guidelines that will set conditions for candidate sites, such as the absence of volcanoes or active faults nearby. Using the guidelines, the government will pick promising sites and ask local municipalities to accept detailed investigations. “The number of promising sites would be considerably large,” METI chief Yoichi Miyazawa has said. In 2007, the town of Toyo, Kochi Prefecture, applied for an on-site survey to examine the possibility of setting up a final disposal site. Strong opposition from residents forced the application to be withdrawn. In 2008, the government set a policy that would choose candidate sites for detailed investigations around 2013. A final selection was due around 2028. At that time, the government hoped to start the final disposal process within a few years of the site selection. But the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster have effectively canceled that timetable.