![]() The hydrogen explosion choked the pool and surrounding area with debris, including fragments of the roof and bits of nearby machinery. Even after the clearing of this debris, equipment and other problems delayed the fuel removal operation by more than four years. The process finally got underway in April 2019. The special crane lifts the some 300-kilogram rods out of the pool one at a time, and they are then taken to a pool in a separate building. Of the 566 rods, 366 had been removed as of Sept. Due to the high radiation in the building itself, the crane is operated remotely from a control facility about 500 meters away. The hardest part of the task is yet to come the handles on 16 of the rods were warped by falling debris, and can't be extracted by the crane as they are. ![]() TEPCO is apparently working on a "grabbing tool" for the crane to lift out the damaged rods, among other methods, in hopes to finish the removal project by March 2021. We get back on the microbus and head down the hill to a spot where we can look up at the No. Here, too, we can see the machinery for the so-called underground ice wall surrounding the No. Groundwater from the mountains flows relentlessly beneath the power station. The walls in the basement levels of the reactor buildings were cracked in the March 2011 quake, letting in the groundwater and rainwater that has come into contact with the nuclear fuel debris, contaminating it. The "ice wall," which TEPCO began making in May 2013, is TEPCO's attempt to control the problem. ![]() The wall is made up of some 1,500 pipes sunk 30 meters into the ground, creating a subterranean perimeter about 1.5 kilometers long around the reactor buildings. Liquid cooled to minus 30 degrees Celsius is then run through the pipes, freezing the soil around them. The Japanese treasury spent about 34.5 billion yen (about $330.7 million) to make the wall, and the electricity and other maintenance to keep it going costs hundreds of millions of yen per year.
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