That method is safer for workers than flooding the reactor, which would also require the management of radioactive water. Technology research and development should focus on removing fuel through the side, the Nuclear Damage Compensation & Decommissioning Facilitation Corp., Tepco’s top government shareholder, said Monday. No such effort is being made at Chernobyl, where a concrete sarcophagus was used to entomb the wrecked plant that melted down in 1986. Fukushima offers a more complex challenge since three reactors suffered total meltdowns, with melted fuel rupturing pressure vessels and falling to the bottom of the units. The so-called defueling process took from 1985 to 1990 and involved removing the partially melted fuel core from inside the pressure vessel of the No. Long-handled devices guided by a television monitor system were developed to remove fuel core debris at Three Mile Island in the U.S. earthquake and tsunami caused multiple meltdowns and destroyed the plant. The removal process is slated to begin in 2021. be melted nuclear fuel covering the floor of a damaged reactor at Japans. 3 reactor was the last unit to be probed, its the first to produce a strong indication of where the fuel came to rest. The search for the fuel has left a trail of dead experimental robots specifically designed to find and photograph the estimated combined 600 metric tons of fuel and debris in the three melted reactors. “Once Tepco has identified the characteristics of this material, then they can develop a plan to remove this material in a safe manner.” “Special tools and techniques will have to be developed to undertake such a task that has never been attempted before anywhere in the world,” said Dale Klein, an adviser to Tepco, as the utility is known, and a former chairman of the U.S. Here are a few ways the removal could be done, including the government’s preferred approach by taking it out the side: This explainer was last updated on May 13. The cleanup process that may last 40 years and cost 8 trillion yen ($72 billion) will require technology not yet invented. Editors Note: This is part of IEEE Spectrums ongoing coverage of Japans earthquake and nuclear emergency. If confirmed, the nation will have to devise a way to remove the highly radioactive material, a mixture of melted nuclear fuel and reactor debris known as corium. Holdings Inc., last week released images that for the first time showed what’s likely melted fuel inside the No. Japan’s biggest utility and owner of the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. All three cores largely melted in the first three days. More than six years after three nuclear reactors melted down in Japan, the country is homing in on the lost fuel inside one of them. (Updated May 2022) Following a major earthquake, a 15-metre tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident beginning on 11 March 2011.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |