nuclear-news

“If the whole decommissioning process were compared to the distance of 100 miles, this work would be only a mile,” said Akira Ono, head of the nuclear power plant, reflecting on the work that took more than one year……..

TEPCO began full-fledged activities to remove the nuclear fuel assemblies from the pool at the No. 4 reactor in November last year. The company repeated the cycle of putting the fuel in a transportation container and taking the container out of the reactor building. Then the spent nuclear fuel was transported to a shared pool about 100 meters west of the reactor building, and unspent fuel was moved to a storage pool at the No. 6 nuclear reactor about one kilometer from the building.

Next, the decommissioning efforts will be focused on the removal of the nuclear fuel from the Nos. 1-3 reactors. Since all of them melted down, radiation levels within their buildings are very high. That would make working conditions there even more difficult than those at the No. 4 reactor building, where workers could operate a crane from the roof above the pool, watching the nuclear fuel directly below them with their own eyes. However, a crane would be mostly remote-controlled at the Nos. 1-3 reactors. But workers still sometimes have to enter the buildings for maintenance and inspection of machines used there. TEPCO is planning to take measures to lower radiation levels there such as by scraping away the contaminated portions of the floors and putting up iron shielding. http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001806728