[Column] Fuel removal of Reactor4 pool to start next week – No quake is allowed for 13 months

Note : If you are from the international mass media, Don’t read this site before taking a contact with me.
It’s too dangerous to touch, but it can’t be left untouched forever.

Tepco is going to start removing the fuel assemblies from reactor4 pool next week.

They will take 13 months to remove over 1500 fuel assemblies one after one, which is over 5,000 times much as Hiroshima bomb (based on Cs-137).

 

They built 6 teams specially trained for this task. One team consists of 6 members. 1 member is from Tepco, but 5 members are from some other company, which Tepco conceals the name of and the reason of the concealment is also concealed.

 

The removed fuel is to be carried to the common usage pool. It’s not clear what to do with the fuel assemblies after transferring to the common pool.

 

Reactor4 spent fuel pool is covered with the crane building, so we cannot see the crane picking up the assemblies from live camera.

 

What makes it more dangerous than the daily fuel removal is the fact that the pool is full of debris.

 

They vacuum the small pieces of the debris over the assemblies but still it’s likely that the crane accidentally picks up a piece of debris when it grabs an assembly.

In that case, it’s possible that the assembly is dropped.

 

Tepco claims one assembly cannot reach the critical state. Even if it’s dropped on other assemblies, it wouldn’t affect the outside of the plant area.

 

Tepco’s statement has always been correct.

Even about the contaminated water issue, they announced it rains so heavily only once in ten years that the contaminated water tank dams overflow. Indeed, it overflowed every time a Typhoon hit Fukushima since this September.

 

As the emergency measures, Tepco is to warn the people around the plant area by using transceiver. This would save everyone like they did in 311.

 

The only thing we could do it to hope no earthquake to occur for the following 13 months. (It was just last week that M7.1 hit Fukushima.)

 

Fukushima Diary will try its best to keep the eyes and ears on reactor4.

I reject the international mass media to read this site without taking a contact with me.I know some of the mass media corporations read Fukushima Diary to understand the trend so they know when to report about Fukushima as if they were independently following it for a long time.
In short, they make you individual readers pay for this site while they pay nothing, and when they publish the “authorized news”, you pay for the “secondhand news”, which is nothing new for us.
This site is free for the individual readers, but not for corporations.In the world, this site is nearly the only source about Fukushima. I came here alone without any supporting organizations, background or anything. I’m not pleased to be exploited by the corporations that didn’t even properly report about Fukushima when 311 took place. I demand them to take a contact with me BEFORE reading this site whatever the purpose is.

_____

Français :

[Édito] Le retrait des combustibles de la piscine du réacteur 4 commence la semaine prochaine – Séismes interdits sur les 13 prochains mois
Note : Si vous êtes de la grande presse internationale, ne lisez pas ce site sans avoir préalablement pris contact avec moi.

 

C’est trop dangereux pour y toucher mais on ne peut pas le laisser éternellement comme ça.
Tepco va commencer le retrait des assemblages de combustible de la piscine du réacteur 4 la semaine prochaine.
Il leur faudra 13 mois pour en retirer plus de 1 500 assemblages de combustible, un par un, ce qui représente plus de 5 000 fois la bombe d’Hiroshima (en se basant sur le Cs 137).

Ils ont constitué 6 équipes spécialement entraînées à cette tâche. Une équipe est constituée de 6 membres : 1 de Tepco mais 5 sont des sous-traitants dont Tepco dissimule le nom et la raison de cette dissimulation est également tenue secrète.

Le combustible retiré sera transporté dans la piscine commune (séparée des réacteurs et située en face des réacteurs 3 et 4 par rapport à leur route d’accès). Ce qui en sera fait après ce transfert dans la piscine commune n’est pas clairement établi.

La piscine à combustibles usagés du réacteur 4 est recouverte par la construction pour les grues, ce qui fait qu’on ne peut pas, à partir des caméras de direct, voir les grues retirer les assemblages.

Ce qui est plus dangereux que le retrait quotidien des combustibles est le fait que cette piscine est remplie de gravas.

Ils aspirent les petits gravas recouvrant les assemblages mais il reste toujours possible qu’une grue attrape accidentellement un gravas tout en agrippant un assemblage.
Dans ce cas, l’assemblage peut tomber.

Tepco affirme qu’un assemblage ne peut pas atteindre la masse critique. Même s’il en tombe un sur les autres assemblages, ça n’aura pas d’impact pas au-delà des limites de la centrale.

Les affirmations de Tepco ont toujours été correctes.
Même lorsque, à propos des eaux extrêmement radioactives, ils ont déclaré qu’il ne pleut assez fortement qu’une fois tous les dix ans pour que les endiguements des citernes en débordent. Néanmoins, depuis septembre dernier, ils ont débordé à chaque typhon passant sur la centrale.

En mesure d’urgence, Tepco prévoit d’avertir la population autour de la centrale en utilisant des talkies-walkies. Ça devrait sauver tout le monde, comme en mars 2011.

La seule chose qu’on puisse faire est d’espérer qu’il n’y aura pas de séisme pendant les 13 prochains mois. (le dernier M7.1 sur Fukushima date de la semaine dernière).

Le Fukushima Diary va faire de son mieux pour garder les yeux et les oreilles rivés sur le réacteur 4.

 

J’interdis à la grande presse internationale de lire et d’utiliser ce site sans préalablement prendre contact avec moi. Je sais que certaines grandes sociétés de presse lisent le Fukushima Diary pour comprendre la tendance et trouver quand rendre compte de la situation de Fukushima comme s’ils la suivaient indépendamment depuis longtemps.
En résumé, ils vous font payer à vous, simples lecteurs, ce qu’ils prennent gratuitement dans ce site et lorsqu’ils publient des “nouvelles de première main” vous payez pour des “nouvelles resucées”, qui n’ont rien de nouveau pour nous.
Ce site est gratuit pour les lecteurs individuels, pas pour les sociétés. Ce site est pratiquement la seule source au monde sur Fukushima. Je viens ici seul sans aucun soutien d’organisation quelconque, ni références, ni rien. Je n’apprécie pas de me faire exploiter par ces sociétés qui n’ont même pas été foutues de relater correctement ce qui se passait à Fukushima quand a eu lieu le mois de mars 2011. Je leur demande de prendre contact avec moi AVANT de lire ce site dans quelque but que ce soit.

  1. So, even before the destruction of Fuku, every time it rained the cooling units containing the spent fuel rods overflowed.

    1. Um … no.

      Before 311 the building roof would keep rain from getting into the spent fuel pools.

      When they talk about overflows they’re talking about the tank farms that have been built since 311.

  2. Some may disagree with the TEPCO assessment of ‘a cakewalk’.

    http www huffingtonpost com/ (2013/10/31/ernest-moniz-fukushima_n_4180897.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green&utm_hp_ref=green)

    Removing the fuel rods from the Unit 4 cooling pool is the first major step in a decommissioning process that is expected to last decades at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.

    Japan’s nuclear regulatory chairman Shunichi Tanaka has warned that removing the fuel rods is a painstaking, high risk process. He says he is more worried about that than the massive amounts of radiation-contaminated water that TEPCO is struggling to manage.

    Despite the worries over potential risks from radiation escaping from the plant, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party has pushed for a restart of nuclear reactors that have all been offline for safety checks and must be inspected under new guidelines.

  3. The civilian nuclear power industry is trying to sell more nuclear reactors and MOX fuel. TEPCO executives and the Japan Prime Minister are making some monumentally STUPID statements. However, let us examine some perhaps more objective and less profit motivated statements … That are ‘on record’

    John Holdren is Obama’s chief science adviser. A physicist and former professor of environmental policy at Harvard and the University of California–Berkeley, he is renowned for his work on climate change, energy technology, and the dangers of nuclear weapons and materials. Steve Fetter, who was assistant director at-large in Holdren’s office, had even more specialized expertise in the science of nuclear accidents. His Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley (where Holdren was his adviser) was titled “Radiological Hazards of Fusion Reactors,” and he conducted more research on that subject after joining the University of Maryland faculty in 1988.

    The biggest source of concern, both men agreed, was the spent fuel pool in Reactor No. 4, which U.S. nuclear experts in Japan believed had lost its capacity to retain water following a nearby explosion. A lack of water in the pool could mean that the 1,000-plus rods of fuel would heat up, catch fire, and emit so much radiation that any workers in the immediate vicinity would fall fatally sick within hours. Such a fire would lift large amounts of dangerous and long-lived radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Supplying water to the other reactors could then become impossible; their fuel would melt and more radiation would be emitted.

    “We are now looking, as you’ve probably surmised from information available publicly, at a high likelihood of releases as large as Chernobyl or even larger,” Holdren wrote in an email to a fellow scientist on March 16, 2011, citing the possibility of a spent-fuel fire.

    1. ” “We are now looking, as you’ve probably surmised from information available publicly, at a high likelihood of releases as large as Chernobyl or even larger,” Holdren wrote in an email to a fellow scientist on March 16, 2011, citing the possibility of a spent-fuel fire. ”

      Which was true two and a half years ago when it was written but is not true today. The heat generated by the spent fuel continues to decrease according to the half-lives of the fission products.

      1. The interested reader has another example of how V. I. (Village Idiot) Diemos earned the V. I. initials.

  4. Not all public figures are caught up in this disingenuous denial of evident danger.

    http www youtube com/ (watch?v=6TxqAGZOX7s)

    Gregory Jaczko, Former USA NRC Chairman

    The Ongoing Fukushima Daiichi Crisis 9/24/2013 (Fuel Removal from FDNPP Spent Fuel Pool)

    “That’s a very significant activity, and it’s also unprecedented.”

    “There’s significant structural damage to the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. New structures had to be created.”

    “They’re going to have to lift significant debris from the pools.”

    “These are all very, very unprecedented activities.”

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About this site

This website updates the latest news about the Fukushima nuclear plant and also archives the past news from 2011. Because it's always updated and added live, articles, categories and the tags are not necessarily fitted in the latest format.
I am the writer of this website. About page remains in 2014. This is because my memory about 311 was clearer than now, 2023, and I think it can have a historical value. Now I'm living in Romania with 3 cats as an independent data scientist.
Actually, nothing has progressed in the plant since 2011. We still don't even know what is going on inside. They must keep cooling the crippled reactors by water, but additionally groundwater keeps flowing into the reactor buildings from the broken parts. This is why highly contaminated water is always produced more than it can circulate. Tepco is planning to officially discharge this water to the Pacific but Tritium is still remaining in it. They dilute this with seawater so that it is legally safe, but scientifically the same amount of radioactive tritium is contained. They say it is safe to discharge, but none of them have drunk it.

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