Crucial operation to remove fuel rods at stricken Fukushima plant launched
Risky task of taking uranium and plutonium assemblies from stricken reactor launched as decommissioning process reaches a crucial stage
Workers at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant on Monday 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.