Removal of fuel in pool at Fukushima’s melted reactor begins

The operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant has begun removing fuel from a cooling pool at one of three reactors that melted down in the 2011 tsunami disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said workers started removing the first of 566 used and unused fuel units stored in the pool at Unit 3.

The fuel units in the pool located high up in reactor buildings are intact despite the disaster, but the pools are not enclosed, so removing the units to safer ground is crucial to avoid disaster in case of another major quake.

Tepco says the removal at Unit 3 would take two years, followed by the two other reactors where about 1,000 fuel units remain in the storage pools.

Removing fuel units from the cooling pools comes ahead of the real challenge of removing melted fuel from inside the reactors, but details of how that might be done are still largely unknown.

Workers are remotely operating a crane built underneath a roof cover to raise the fuel from a storage rack in the pool and place it into a protective cask.

The whole process occurs underwater to prevent radiation leaks. Each cask will be filled with seven fuel units, then lifted from the pool and lowered to a truck that will transport the cask to a safer cooling pool elsewhere at the plant.

About an hour after the work began, the first fuel unit was safely stored inside the cask, Tepco said.

“I believe everything is going well so far,” plant chief Tomohiko Isogai told Japan’s NHK television from Fukushima. “We will watch the progress at the site as we put safety first. Our goal is not to rush the process but to carefully proceed with the decommissioning work.”

In 2014, Tepco safely removed all 1,535 fuel units from the storage pool at a fourth reactor that was idle and had no fuel inside its core when the March 11 2011, earthquake and tsunami occurred.

Robotic probes have photographed and detected traces of damaged nuclear fuel in the three reactors that had meltdowns, but the exact location and other details of the melted fuel are largely unknown.

Removing fuel from the cooling pools will help free up space for the subsequent removal of the melted fuel, though details of how to gain access to it are yet to be decided.

Experts say the melted fuel in the three reactors amounts to more than 800 tonnes.