An attempt to use an extendable robot to remove a fragment of melted fuel from a wrecked reactor at Japan’s tsunami-hit Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was suspended yesterday due to a technical issue.
The collection of a tiny sample of the debris inside Unit 2 reactor’s primary containment vessel would start the fuel debris removal phase, the most challenging part of the decades-long decommissioning of the plant, at which three reactors were destroyed after a tsunami hit the site following an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale on March 11, 2011.
The work was stopped when workers noticed that five 1.5m pipes used to maneuver the robot were placed in the wrong order and could not be corrected within the time limit for their radiation exposure, said Tokyo Electric Power Co Holdings (TEPCO), the plant’s operator.
Photo curtesy of TEPCO via AP
The pipes were to be used to push the robot inside and pull it back out when it finished. Once inside the vessel, the robot is operated remotely from a safer location.
The robot can extend up to about 22m to reach its target area to collect a fragment from the surface of the melted fuel mound using a device equipped with tongs that hang from the tip of the robot.
The mission to obtain the fragment and return with it is to last two weeks.
A new start date had not been decided, TEPCO said.
TEPCO president Tomoaki Kobayakawa said the priority was safety rather than rushing the process and that he planned to investigate the cause of the pipe setup problem.
“I understand that the decision was to stop and not push when there was a concern,” Kobayakawa told reporters in Niigata Prefecture, where he visited to discuss another TEPCO-operated nuclear power plant with the local community.
The sample-return mission is the first crucial step of a decades-long decommissioning at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site.
However, its goal to bring back less than 3g of an estimated 880 tonnes of radioactive molten fuel underscores the daunting challenges.
Despite the small amount of the debris sample, it would provide key data to develop decommissioning methods and necessary technology and robots, experts say.
Better understanding of the melted fuel debris is key to decommissioning the three wrecked reactors and the entire plant.
The Japanese government and TEPCO are sticking to a 30-to-40-year cleanup target set soon after the meltdown, despite criticism that it is unrealistic. No specific plans for the full removal of the melted fuel debris or its storage have been decided.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver