More than 14 years after the nuclear accident in March 2011 in Japan, the Fukushima plant will undergo one of its most delicate operations. A robot will attempt to recover a small quantity of the melted nuclear fuel, which caused the radioactive releases. An operation that is a real feat.
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On paper, the operation planned for this robot at the Fukushima plant in eastern Japan may seem simple: it involves extracting at most 3 grams of melted nuclear fuel from the bowels of the wrecked reactor number two. But in reality, it is incredibly complex, to the point that this operation, initially planned for 2021, has already been postponed three times.
The main difficulty lies in the fact that the melted fuel is in a state that is not precisely known, in a place inaccessible to humans due to a lethal level of radioactivity. Hence the dispatch of inspection robots for several years and this time of a remote-controlled telescopic clamp.
In the previous operation, in late February 2024, two mini-drones and a snake-shaped mini-robot were lowered into one of the three badly damaged reactors. The operation was interrupted due to technical problems. The snake-shaped robot was unable to reach its destination because its cables were not working properly, the daily reported. Mainichi.
“We will proceed with caution, making safety our top priority.”
An operation managerat a press conference
As such an operation is unprecedented, it is not certain that it will succeed, says a Tepco manager: “We think it will take a week for the robotic gripper to reach the extraction point and a week to return, but in concrete terms it will depend on the progress on the ground.”
Even if this first experiment were to succeed, there is no guarantee of what will happen next. Because in total, it is not a few grams of ultra-radioactive melted fuel that must be removed, but nearly 900 tons, spread across three reactors, without knowing what will be done with this extremely dangerous material.
