Nuclear security
Some of the last nuclear fuel rod
assemblies to be removed from the teetering fuel pool above the No. 4 reactor
are winched out of the heavily damaged building to a more secure facility in a
transport container (center) Saturday at the Fukushima No. 1 plant. |
POOL/KYODO
All spent fuel removed from reactor 4 pool at
Fukushima No. 1, Tepco says
KYODO
Tepco
said Saturday it has finished removing all fuel rods from the spent-fuel pool
in the shattered reactor 4 building at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, in a
rare piece of positive news from the decommissioning process.
A
total of 1,535 fuel rod assemblies, comprising 1,331 deemed at risk and 204
that were unused, have been transferred to other buildings following a yearlong
process by Tokyo Electric Power Co., the beleaguered operator of the wrecked
plant.
According
to Tepco, this will reduce the risk of the spent fuel rods being exposed in the
event of a new earthquake or a major accident.
“Completion
of the removal work is a milestone and I feel deeply about it,” plant chief
Akira Ono told reporters, while stressing that the decommissioning of Fukushima
No. 1 remains an extremely lengthy process.
The
overall cleanup and dismantling of the plant, an operation that is expected to
take decades, has been delayed by a relentless on-site buildup of toxic
radioactive water.
Reactor
4 avoided a core meltdown when the tsunami spawned by the March 11, 2011,
earthquake ripped through the No. 1 plant, as the unit was offline for a
regular inspection and all of its fuel was stored in the pool on the upper
level of the building.
But
the building was torn apart by a hydrogen explosion just days later as the
enormity of the nuclear crisis was only just becoming apparent. The over 1,500
fuel rod assemblies that continued to be stored at the top of the devastated
structure had remained a major source of concern, in Japan and overseas.
Tepco
hopes to begin extracting the fuel from the reactor 3 spent-fuel pool in the
next fiscal year beginning in April, and to begin the same operation at reactor
1 during fiscal 2017. But it is unknown whether the work will follow that
schedule given the sky-high radiation levels that continue to plague reactors 1
through 3, which each suffered core meltdowns, and which put the levels clocked
in reactor 4 in the shade.
No comments:
Post a Comment