Fukushima spent fuel rods

11-7-2013  Christina Consolo, the founder and host of Nuked Radio, who has studied the Fukushima disaster in depth, told RT that she was not optimistic that the operation would be successful.

“The worst-case scenario is that there’s a nuclear chain reaction, a criticality in the pool during this procedure and it can’t be stopped,” she said.

Still, Consolo said Japan has no option but to proceed with the operation, as they can’t leave the fuel rods where they are, (1500 rods stored in a water pool atop reactor @#4 at Fukushima) as “even a mild earthquake could cause the building to collapse.” 

Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist from the organization Beyond Nuclear, believes it is “absurd” that TEPCO is in charge of this globally significant extraction operation, instead of delegating it to the “best and brightest nuclear engineers in the world.  If something goes wrong this could be a global catastrophe that dwarfs (exceedingly!) what has happened in Fukushima Daiichi thus far,” Kamps told RT.  “Tokyo Electric has shown its true colors time and time again, its incompetence, its dishonesty, so it’s very frightening that TEPCO is in charge of this.”

Arnold Gunderson, a nuclear power expert, explained to RT that what they will attempt to do at Fukushima has never been done before but it has to be done, because it is too dangerous to keep the nuclear fuel “way up in the air” given the seismic problems facing the crippled plant.

“There is more radioactivity in that fuel pool than in all the bombs than in all the bombs that were fired in above ground testing.  So we have the equivalent of 700 nuclear bombs worth of material in that fuel pool. These [the fuel rods] are not going to pull out easily and the fear is, is that they might snap and release the radiation that’s inside them,” he told RT.

If one of the rods were to be exposed to the air it would release radiation and heat up, potentially triggering a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.  TEPCO has said that this is unlikely to occur.

TEPCO’s management of the crisis situation has been criticized as haphazard and ill-planned, with one Japanese minister likening it to a game of “whack-a-mole.”  Currently the organization is battling to stop leaks of radioactive water from the tanks used to cool the reactors.

While the extraction of the fuel rods represents a significant challenge for TEPCO, the much more complex task of removing the misshapen cores of the stricken reactors awaits scientists. https://www.rt.com/news/fukushima-fuel-rod-removal-365/

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video of fuel rod removal that took a year:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pZVPux-bzs

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fuel rods for units 1, 2, 3 were removed (550 yards away from reactor units.  units 5 and 6 reactor rods, 3200 of them, still await removal.  -r)

https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/hd/decommission/progress/removal/index-e.html