Last Major Debris Removed from Fukushima Spent N-Fuel Pool

Fukushima, Aug. 2 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo Electric Power Co. <9501> removed on Sunday a 20-ton piece of debris from a spent nuclear fuel pool in the No. 3 reactor building at TEPCO's disaster-crippled Fukushima No. 1 power plant. Now that work to clear major wreck in and around the pool has been completed, the company is set to devise ways to decontaminate the building and prevent radiation leaks during work scheduled to start in fiscal 2017 to remove a total of 566 fuel assemblies from the reactor, TEPCO officials said. According to TEPCO, in the 80-minute work the 14-meter-long portion of a fuel handling machine for the reactor was lifted from the bottom of the pool and placed on the ground outside the building by two remote-control cranes. Radiation levels in the building's premises showed no major changes before and after the work. The work was carried out carefully so as not to damage the fuel assemblies in the pool, company officials said. The building's top was blown off by a steam blast after the nuclear plant was hit by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011, which led to the triple meltdown at the plant. END