TOKYO (Reuters) - Twelve years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan has started to release treated radioactive water into the sea, a key step in the process of decommissioning the stricken plant, but much tougher tasks lie ahead, such as molten fuel removal.
Here are the challenges facing the government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co as they try to draw a line by the middle of the century under the world's worst nuclear accident since Chornobyl.Tepco has described the effort to remove highly radioactive fuel debris from reactor cores as an"unprecedented and difficult challenge never attempted anywhere in the world".
At Three Mile Island , the U.S. nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that partly melted down in 1979 after a failure, fuel debris was kept under water during retrieval work, providing a shield against radiation. Japan and Tepco plan to remove molten fuel while it is exposed to air because it is difficult to fill the badly damaged reactor cores with water.The Fukushima plant suffered triple meltdowns, compared to the single fuel core meltdown at Three Mile Island, which means the debris retrieval operation will be much larger and more complicated this time around.
But the law requires the soil stored at the interim site, located next to the tsunami-wrecked power plant, to be moved out of Fukushima within 30 years from when it began operating in 2015.
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