Fukushima
operator TEPCO is getting ready for its toughest and the most
dangerous clean-up operation. In November it will try to remove 400
tons of spent fuel from plant’s Reactor No. 4. But even a little
mistake may result in a new nuclear disaster.
The
operation is scheduled to start in the beginning of November and be
completed by around the end of 2014.
Under
normal circumstances, the operation to remove all the fuel would take
about 100 days. TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co) initially planned to
take two years, but reduced the schedule to one year in recognition
of the urgency, as even a minor earthquake could trigger an
uncontrolled fuel leak.
During
this period TEPCO plans to carefully remove more than 1,300 used fuel
rod assemblies, packing radiation 14,000 times the equivalent of the
Hiroshima nuclear bomb, from their cooling pool.
The
base of the pool where the fuel assemblies are situated is 18 meters
above ground and the rods are 7 meters under the surface of the
water.
TEPCO’s
first task is to remove the debris from the Reactor No. 4 fuel pool.
Then,
one by one, the fuel rods will be removed from the top store of the
damaged building using a crane suspended above the crippled reactor.
Previously
a computer-controlled process, this time it has to be done completely
manually. And this is what makes this removal operation extremely
dangerous.
The
fuel rods must be kept submerged and must not touch each other or
break.
“The
operation to begin removing fuel from such a severely damaged pool
has never been attempted before. The rods are unwieldy and very
heavy, each one weighing two-thirds of a ton,”
fallout researcher Christina Consolo earlier told
RT.
Should
the attempt fail, a mishandled rod could be exposed to air and catch
fire, resulting in horrific quantities of radiation released into the
atmosphere. The resulting radiation will be too great for the cooling
pool to absorb as it simply has not been designed to do so.
In
the worst-case scenario, the pool could come crashing to the ground,
dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and cause an
explosion many times worse than in March 2011.
“The
worst-case scenario could play out in death to billions of people. A
true apocalypse,” Consolo said.
Reactor
No. 4 contains 10 times more Cesium-137 than Chernobyl did. This lets
scientists warn that in case of another nuclear disaster, it will be
the beginning of the ultimate catastrophe of the world and the
planet.
“It
will be one of the worst, but most important jobs anyone has ever had
to do. And even if executed flawlessly, there are still many things
that could go wrong,” Consolo said.
The
World Nuclear Report, released in July 2013, said “the
worst-case scenario” will require evacuation of up to 10
million people within a 250-kilometer radius of Fukushima, including
a significant part of Tokyo.
Although
some experts are skeptical, TEPCO is confident the operation will be
a success. Last year two fuel rods were successfully removed from the
pool in a test operation, but back then rod assemblies were empty and
posed a far smaller threat.
The
operation will be just one installment in the decommissioning process
for the plant, and is forecast to take about 40 years and cost $11
billion.
TEPCO,
responsible for the clean-up, is struggling to cope with the
aftermath of the nuclear disaster, but with the crisis over
radiation-contaminated water at the plant, it has been criticized for
its ad hoc response to the disaster. In August TEPCO pleaded for
overseas help to contain the radioactive fallout, after 18 months of
trying to control it internally.
The
Japanese government was also ordered to take a more active role in
controlling the overflow of radioactive water being flushed over the
melted reactors in Units 1, 2 and 3 at the plant.
Three
of the Fukushima plant’s nuclear reactors were damaged by an
earthquake-triggered tsunami on March 11, 2011, which led to a
nuclear disaster. The plant has been accumulating radioactive water
ever since. The government imposed a 20-kilometer ‘no-go’ zone
around the plant area.
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