Fukushima: the Removal of Nuclear Fuel Rods From Damaged Reactor Building Begins (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Workers at the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have begun removing fuel rods from a storage pool near one of the three reactors that suffered meltdowns eight years ago. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said on Monday that work had begun to remove the first of 566 used and unused fuel assemblies in reactor building No 3. The fuel rods stored in unit No 3's cooling pool were not damaged in the 2011 disaster, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi's backup power supply and triggered the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, 25 years earlier.

Tepco said the operation to remove the fuel rods, which are in uncovered pools, would take two years, adding that transferring them to safer ground would better protect them in the event of another catastrophic earthquake. Workers are remotely operating a crane 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. The utility plans to repeat the procedure in the two other reactors that suffered meltdowns.

Comments

Re:That's nice but..

[dgatwood]

When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.

When the NIMBYs stop fighting the deployment of newer designs. As long as pseudo-regulatory barriers erected by the general public make development of new plants based on new designs financially infeasible, companies will stretch the operation of their existing plants far beyond their original design lifespan. It is rather amazing just how much the anti-nuclear movement has made nuclear safety worse.

Re:Solars dangerous too

[sfcat]

Yeh, damn NIMBY's causing Fukushima with their pseudo-regulatory barriers. Solar's also dangerous! What if a solar panel fell and landed on a bird, it could chop the bird in two!...

NIMBY's kill birds!

Ok, let's look at the facts. Lets just start with the total deaths per energy produced. So even with the bad old nuclear designs from the 50s to 70s that we currently use are better than any other energy source. Even with that very few people want to build more BWR or RBMK's. Most scientists and engineers want to build MSRs but to build a nuclear plant you have to follow regulations that written for LWRs and BWRs. For instance, you have to have a Boron system in your nuclear plant by regulation. The Boron system is used to prevent water from splitting into H2 and O2 gasses in a high radiation environment. If too much gas builds up it explodes. So its a good regulation. Except MSRs don't use water for a coolant so there is no Boron system in an MSR. So technically, a MSR plant which can't meltdown and doesn't require external power isn't legal in the US. So an elected official(s) needs to change the regulations but nobody is willing to be the person who changes nuclear regulation due to the NIMBYs. So we have a design that we have been able to build for 60 years, can't meltdown and by any measure is far safer than the LWR and BWRs we are still building. Do you see any MSRs being built?

Consider this, have any of you ever seen an engineering situation where making something a political issue causes better decisions to be made? I doubt it, I never have and you probably haven't either. Making energy production a political issue is just the same as getting the VP of Marketing to choose which web framework you use. We've had a solution that works for decades and instead we delay and promise unicorns which never exist. Your arguments are largely out of ignorance. You probably know about your chosen profession but you clearly don't work in energy. You are expressing your largely uninformed opinions about a subject you haven't spent time researching deeply. And that causes you to believe things that just aren't so and often violate basic principles of physics. But energy production is about physics and physics alone and doesn't give a shit about what you wish was so. Perhaps it would be better to leave these topics to experts but as long as this is a political issue, I don't expect any progress.