workers begin removing nuclear fuel at fukushima's melted reactor - commercial energy storage systems

Tsunami operators
The damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant began on Monday to remove fuel from one of the three reactors that were melted from the 2011 disaster, a milestone in decades --
The long process of dismantling the facility.
Tokyo Electric Power Company
The above-mentioned workers began to dismantle the first of the 566 used and unused fuel units stored in Unit 3 pools.
Despite the disaster, the fuel units in the pool located at the height of the reactor building are intact, but the pool is not closed, so in the event of another earth quake similar to the 2011 tsunami, moving these units to a safer ground is the key to avoiding disaster.
TEPCO said the dismantling of unit 3 would take two years, followed by two other reactors, some 1,000 of which remained in the storage pool.
Taking the fuel unit out of the cooling pool is a real challenge to take the molten fuel out of the reactor's interior, but the details of how to do this are still largely unknown.
Due to accidents, high radiation and radioactive debris, the fuel in the cooling tank has been delayed for more than four years, and the debris comes from the explosion that occurred when the reactor melted, highlighting the difficulties that still exist.
Workers are remotely operating cranes built under jelly. roll-
Raise the fuel from the storage rack of the pool and place it in a protective bucket.
To prevent radiation leakage, the whole process occurs underwater.
Each barrel will be filled with seven fuel units, then lifted from the pool and lowered to the truck, which will ship the barrels to a safer cooling pool elsewhere in the plant.
The work was done remotely from the control room of about 500 yuan because still-
High radiation levels inside the reactor building that houses the pool.
"So far, I believe everything is going well," Tomohiko Isogai, head of the plant, told NHK, a Japanese public broadcaster.
"When we put safety first, we observe progress on the spot.
Our goal is not to speed up this process, but to take the retirement work seriously.
TEPCOspokesperson Takahiro Kimoto said: "After about an hour of work started on Monday, the first fuel unit was safely stored in the barrel.
Monday's operation, he said, will end after placing the fourth device in a barrel.
Kimoto said no major damage was found to the fuel unit on Monday, but factory officials will double check if there are any fine holes or other violations.
However, the removal of 725 tons of melted fuel caused a problem with the storage capacity of the plant, because there are already 6,000 fuel units in the public pool from the fuel flow of Unit 3, almost full.
Kimoto says TEPCO has made room for the upcoming fuel in the public pool through the mobile Year --
Put Old and cool enough fuel into a dry bucket for safer, longer fuel
Although further details are being developed, terminology storage.
On 2014, Tepco safely removed all 1,535 fuel units from the storage pool of the idle fourth reactor at the time of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, with no fuel in the core.
The robot detector has already taken and detected traces of damaged nuclear fuel in three already melted reactors, but the exact location and other details of the melted fuel are largely unknown.
Taking the fuel out of the cooling pool will help to make room for the subsequent removal of the melted fuel, although the details of how to get the fuel have not yet been decided.
Experts say the melting fuel in the three reactors reached more than 725 tons, more than six times the 1979 accident on the Pa Three mile Island.
The core part of a reactor has melted.
In February, a remote
The controlled robot with pliers removed the pebbles of the nuclear debris from the Fukushima Unit 2 reactor, but could not remove the larger debris, indicating the need to develop a robot that can break the debris into smaller ones
Tokyo Electric Power, a Japanese power company, admitted that after a new purpose was discovered in Toshiba's Radiation Research, the company lied about the fuse.
The energy systems department that developed the robot said the findings were key to determining the appropriate equipment and technology needed to remove the melted fuel, the most challenging part of retirement.
Tokyo Electric Power and government officials plan to determine later this year how to remove the melted fuel from three damaged reactors so they can start the process in 2021.