Fuel Rod Removal Operation Begins At Tsunami-hit Fukushima 101
rtoz writes "TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) has started removing fuel rods from a storage pond at the Unit 4 reactor building of Tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power station in Japan. The first of the fuel-rod assemblies at the plant's No. 4 reactor building was transferred from an underwater rack on the fifth floor to a portable cask. This step is an early milestone in decommissioning the facility amid doubts about whether the rods had been damaged and posed a radiation risk. 22 unused fuels will be moved to the cask a task which is planned to be completed by November 19. After being filled with fuel, the cask will be closed with a lid, and following decontamination, will be taken down to ground level and transported to the common spent fuel pool on a trailer. It is planned to take approximately one week from placing the fuel into the cask at the spent fuel pool to storing it in the common pool. The entire removal of all fuel inside the Unit 4 spent fuel pool is planned to take until the end of 2014."
Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
Good. It's about time to get those fuel rods out of there.
The US needs Yucca Mountain. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better to have fuel rods inside a mountain than at reactor sites. After all, Yucca Mountain is in an area so isolated that it used to be used for above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still waiting for an announcement about some scientist "discovering" that subduction zones are a good place to bury stuff that you don't want to worry about seeing back up any time soon.
Re:And then? And then? (Score:2, Interesting)
No plan?
You realize Obama didn't actually kill Yucca Mountain in any legal way. He just defunded it. The next sane president will restore it's funding without so much as consulting congress.
Reprocessing (Score:1, Interesting)
Nuclear reprocessing [wikipedia.org]. Perfectly feasible, routinely performed in other countries, disallowed in the United States for purely political reasons.
Another great legacy of Jimmy Carter, one that's particularly ironic given his qualification in nuclear submarines, and the fact that he regarded Hyman Rickover as one of the people that most shaped his life.
Re:And then? And then? (Score:2, Interesting)
At a guess, spent fuel from Fukushima isn't likely to end up in the US, and while re-opening Yucca Mountain would probably be okay (you guys know we have another similar salt-dome repository, solely used by the military, right?) I suspect that the present method is okay, too: stashing it in casks out in the parking lot of the reactor facilities.
In any case, it would be really cool if you anti-nuclear guys would get over the notion that this stuff is somehow magically evil. It's a relatively small quantity of admittedly nasty stuff, but unlike your average poison it gets less poisonous while it's sitting around, it's pretty easy to detect leaks with simple equipment, and as designed, it all stays sealed up and you have the luxury of deciding where to put it. If only all industrial waste was like this.