Clean-up activities at the nuclear plant began in November 2013

Jan 16, 2014 07:51 GMT  ·  By

On November 18, Tokyo Electric Power Company, otherwise known as Tepco, began removing fuel assemblies from the Fukushima nuclear plant's Reactor No. 4.

By November 25, workers had succeeded in ridding the facility of 22 fuel roads, all of which were transferred to a safer location.

Recent news on the topic says that, over these past few weeks, clean-up activities have continued at a fairly quick pace and that the nuclear plant's Reactor No. 4 is now 154 fuel rods lighter.

According to Clean Technica, the 154 fuel assemblies were pulled out of the reactor by January 15.

Together with the rods collected by November 25, the ones successfully removed by yesterday were placed inside steel-walled canisters and taken to a safe location.

As previously reported, the nuclear reactor that workers are now pulling fuel rods from contained a total of 1,533 fuel assemblies, some of which damaged, at the time when clean-up operations began.

Of these, 1,331 are spent ones. The remaining 202 are unspent.

In a press release issued before work on removing fuel assemblies from Reactor No. 4, Tepco explained that, due to the fact that the spent rods are much more dangerous than the unspent ones, workers were to first remove the latter.

However, it would appear that clean-up activities are going so smoothly that Tepco has managed to collect and carry both spent and unspent assemblies to safety.

The spent assemblies must be handled with extreme caution, due to the fact that there is always a risk of explosion. Besides, these rods can release both noteworthy amounts of heat and deadly levels of radiation.

In order to move them, workers rely on robot cranes and other machinery.

Given the fact that just 10% of the fuel rods inside the reactor have until now been properly dealt with, there is little denying that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Still, Tepco is confident that work on ridding the nuclear plant's Reactor No. 4 of all the fuel rods inside it will be completed in about a year's time since clean-up started.