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WORKERS AT JAPAN’S Fukushima nuclear plant today began moving fuel rods from a reactor building, in their most difficult and dangerous task since a tsunami crippled the facility in 2011.
Operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said it had begun the process of removing the uranium and plutonium rods from a storage pool — a tricky but essential step in the complex’s decades-long decommissioning plan.
The operation follows months of setbacks and glitches that have stoked widespread criticism of the utility’s handling of the crisis, the worst nuclear accident in a generation.
The work pales in comparison with the much more complex task that awaits engineers, who will have to remove the misshapen cores of three other reactors that went into meltdown before being brought under control two years ago.
The fuel rods are bundled together in so-called assemblies which must be pulled out of the storage pool where they were being kept when a tsunami smashed into Fukushima in March 2011. There are more than 1,500 such assemblies in the pool.
Unit 1 and 2 reactor buildings at Fukushima. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye/File)
Over the course of two days, the company said it expects to remove 22 assemblies, with the entire operation scheduled to run for more than a year.
“At 15:18 (06:18 GMT), we started to pull up the first fuel assembly with a crane,” a company spokesman said today.
The huge crane, with a remote-controlled grabber, is being lowered into the pool and then hooked onto the assemblies, placing them inside a fully immersed cask.
The 91-tonne cask will then be hauled from the pool to be loaded onto a trailer and taken to a different storage pool about 100 metres away.
Caution
Experts have warned that slip-ups could trigger a rapid deterioration in the situation. Even minor mishaps will create considerable delays in the already long and complicated decommissioning.
While such operations are routine at other nuclear plants, the disaster has made conditions far more complex, TEPCO has said.
(AP Photo/David Guttenfelder/Pool)
“This is an important process that is an inevitable part of the decommissioning process, but it includes work that could pose a great risk,” the Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center, an independent energy think tank, said in a statement.
“We expect TEPCO and the Nuclear Regulation Authority to work with vigilance… and we demand disclosure of information” about the work, it added.
Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, said the timing of the fuel rod removal was crucial as “the reactor’s storage pool is in an unstable condition”.
Koide added that the whole decommissioning process would involve tasks that pose “unprecedented challenges”.
Setbacks
A worker measures water levels at Fukushima (Tokyo Electric Power Co/File photo)
Work at the plant has suffered months of setbacks including multiple leaks from tanks storing radioactive water, and a power outage caused when a rat electrocuted itself on a circuit board.
TEPCO’s management of the problems has been criticised as haphazard and uncoordinated, with one government minister saying it was like watching someone playing “whack-a-mole”.
The full decommissioning of Fukushima is likely to take decades and include tasks that have never been attempted anywhere in the world.
Villages and towns nearby remain largely empty. Fear of radiation makes residents unable or unwilling to return to live in the shadow of the leaking plant.
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Sounds like a job for Homer Simpson…….
Too many accidents with these reactors :( ……. I don’t understand the complexities of these power stations only that IMO the negatives out weigh the positives. I guess we are lucky that our need for power is now where near the likes of japan, Great Britain , France, Russia USA so on …….. But in a very developed society like japan …. They are making big blunders with the clean up……. Very frightening stuff !
I am a graduate of physics and my phd is related to marine energy so I am not a huge supporter of nuclear energy, as I think there are better ways of generating energy, but you need to look at this in context. There has only been 3 major nuclear reactor accidents so far and there has been zero deaths from fukashima. Thousands die every year to power coal factories. In mines, at plants and from lung related illnesses. If you take those stats in to consideration nuclear is a much cleaner and safer form of energy generation. The deaths from fossil fuel energy are largely ignored. It makes a lot of money.
the earth has natural barriers to protect us from this sort of radiation, so what do we do we build these reactors to harvest it, they should all be decommissioned!
It’s still far far safer and cleaner than coal, oil and gas. What happened at Fukashima could have been easily prevented. There has been no deaths as a result of it, the radiation levels aren’t enough to cause birth defects either. In other nuclear power plants there has been no reports of death from exposure to radiation. It’s the fossil fuel power plants and the fossil fuel industries that cause the most death and destruction to our planet by far.
This quote from Matt Ridley is worth reading
“Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout.”
And all due to the use of fossil fuels. That industry has made great strides in work place safety and will be our main source of power for the foreseeable future. LFTR which is being refined by China,India and Norway right now is a safe way of harnessing the power of the atom and so-called ‘green power ‘ will is being seen as an expensive joke in many countries. However as an island depending on imported energy we should and will improve our use of marine, estuarine and river power which are all known quantities but maybe forget using this power on a national scale with all its distribution problems and stick to local usage? Almost every town had its own gasworks in the past and some industry had its electricity generators [ I have seen pre-war wooden trunking used in 110v circuits ] What ever we use it will have to be constant and reliable and affordable.
The voice of reason. Thank you Fiona.
Hundreds of US naval staff have spent months living in close proximity to reactors and even sleeping above them in submarines with no ill effects and their offspring have not been abnormal in any way as many studies have shown.
As a Navy man myself I have always considered Submariners to be a rather odd bunch of lads but have not noticed any increase in nuttiness in chaps who went on nuclear boats
“At a test site in Norway, Thor Energy has successfully created a thorium nuclear reactor — but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word thorium. The Norwegians haven’t solved the energy crisis and global warming in one fell swoop — they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor. What they have done, though, which is still very cool, is use thorium instead of uranium in a conventional nuclear reactor. In one fell swoop, thorium fuel, which is safer, less messy to clean up, and not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation, could quench the complaints of nuclear power critics everywhere.”
If there was ever a day to call in sick!!
Aren’t we lucky we don’t use nuclear powered energy. Oh wait…
http://www.thejournal.ie/east-west-interconnector-opens-601996-Sep2012
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