The clean up team at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant has revealed that 600 tonnes of radioactive reactor fuel melted during the disaster, and that the exact location still remains a mystery. The company hopes to locate and start removing the missing fuel from 2021, Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s chief of decommissioning told ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program. He added that Japan does not yet possess the technology to extract the melted uranium fuel. RT reports: Following the tsunami-caused 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant uranium fuel of three power generating reactors gained critical temperature and burnt through the respective reactor pressure vessels, concentrating somewhere on the lower levels of the station currently filled with water. The melted nuclear fuel from Reactor 1 poured out completely, estimated 30 to 50 percent of fuel from Reactor 2 and 3 remained in the active zone, Masuda said. The official estimates that approximately “200 tons of [nuclear fuel] debris lies within each unit,” which makes in total about 600 tons of melted fuel mixed up with metal construction elements, concrete and whatever else was down there. Five years after the Fukushima tragedy, the exact location of the highly radioactive “runaway” fuel remains mystery for TEPCO. [...]
