Fukushima: Where are melted fuel rods?

Fukushima Watch: Tepco Finally Gets an Official Cleanup Plan

Most of the world may not have noticed, but the cleanup efforts at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant passed a big milestone on Wednesday. A bureaucratic milestone, at least.

WSJ,

15 August, 2013

The fact is that until Aug. 14, 2013 — two years, five months and three days after the natural disasters that set off Japan’s worst nuclear accident — all the work that was going on at the accident site to tame and cool the reactors as well as control contamination was, officially, ad hoc.

No longer: bureaucracy has finally set in.

On Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Japan’s nuclear regulator, officially approved an plan that lays out — in 3,695 detailed pages — everything from the broad road map that Fukushima Daiichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. is following to clean up and dismantle the crippled plant, to the procedures it’ll follow, the equipment it’ll use and checks needed to ensure everything goes safely.

Picking a page at random — II-2-13-attachment 4-46 — JRT found two colorful diagrams showing the heat distribution of the inner walls of the concrete module of a dry-storage cask to store nuclear fuel, for two different wind speeds. III-2-12-9 lays out part of quality-control plan, covering the creation of a quality-control manual and rules concerning the storage of documents and logs.

What does this all mean? Until now, Tepco was proceeding with its cleanup work at Fukushima Daiichi without a set plan or official guidelines to help it along — as is natural after an unprecedented disaster. When Tepco wanted to do something — build a structure to help it remove spent fuel from a pool atop Unit 4, for instance — it would have its proposal evaluated by regulators in an ad-hoc manner.

Now that Tepco has presented its grand plant-dismantling plan and gotten approval, however, it’s legally bound to follow it, and is liable for penalties if it doesn’t. Having a plan also means the NRA can now figure out an organized way to check up on things, and make sure everything is on track and in order.

Of course, there are still lots of unknowns and unknowables about the cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi — where exactly the melted fuel rods are, for instance, and how to get them out safely. Thus, the plan will be changed and updated as needed in the future, an NRA official told JRT. But it’s good to have some official system in place for the running and regulation of the cleanup operation, the NRA says. After all, experts expect the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup could take as long as 40 years