The company expects it will be about a year before the reactor is fuel rods-free

Nov 18, 2013 21:16 GMT  ·  By

Last week, Tepco announced that it was getting ready to debut cleanup activities at Fukushima. Recent news on the topic says that this Monday workers are to start removing fuel rods from the plant's Reactor No. 4.

As previously reported, both this reactor and two others, No. 1 and No. 3, were badly damaged by the earthquake and the tsunami that hit the nuclear facility back in March 2011.

Despite the fact that reactor No. 4 sustained the least amount of damage, the fact that it sits well above ground level and is also tilted makes it more vulnerable to any potential new disturbances.

Hence, it was agreed that it should be the first to have the highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods removed from inside it. The Telegraph tells us that, all things considered, the cleanup activities that began today will take about one year to complete.

During this time, workers are expected to pull out 1,331 spent fuel rods and 202 new ones from Reactor No. 4 and transfer them to a more stable and therefore safer storage facility, the same source details.

The process is said to be very dangerous and tricky. Thus, experts warn that, should something not go according to plan and should one of these rods either be exposed to air or accidentally break during the transfer, loads of radioactive gases will inevitably work their way into the atmosphere.

Tepco, the company that owns and operated Fukushima, says that its workers are well equipped and trained to handle the situation, and that there is very little doubt that cleanup activities will go smoothly.

“TEPCO and its partners have made extensive preparations and are employing specialized technology designed to meet the particular needs of extracting the fuel from the damaged building and safely moving it to more secure storage,” specialist Lake H. Barrett also argued in a statement issued last week.

When Tepco is done removing the fuel rods from Reactor No. 4, it will move to cleaning up Reactor No. 1 and No. 3. All in all, decommissioning the damaged nuclear facility is expected to take several decades.