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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. Liquid cooled to minus 30 degrees Celsius is then run through the pipes, freezing the soil around them. 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. The "ice wall," which TEPCO began making in May 2013, is TEPCO's attempt to control the problem.
FUKUSHIMA 3RD REACTOR MELTDOWN CRACKED
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. Groundwater from the mountains flows relentlessly beneath the power station. Here, too, we can see the machinery for the so-called underground ice wall surrounding the No. We get back on the microbus and head down the hill to a spot where we can look up at the No. 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. 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. Due to the high radiation in the building itself, the crane is operated remotely from a control facility about 500 meters away. Of the 566 rods, 366 had been removed as of Sept. 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. The process finally got underway in April 2019. Even after the clearing of this debris, equipment and other problems delayed the fuel removal operation by more than four years. The hydrogen explosion choked the pool and surrounding area with debris, including fragments of the roof and bits of nearby machinery. "There's a newly installed crane in there to take the fuel out," said our guide Masayuki Ueda, who is a manager at the Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning unit of the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO). Inside, operations are underway to remove the fuel rods from the 12-meter-deep storage pool. 3 reactor building is encased in what looks like a Baumkuchen layer cake stood upright. However, the plant workers managed to keep the rods cool, averting a major secondary disaster. To complicate matters further, the reactor buildings had fuel storage pools each containing between 392 and 1,534 nuclear fuel rods. 3 building by plumbing, was blown apart by a hydrogen explosion. There were core meltdowns in all three of the active reactors, with the fuel mixing with material from the surrounding structure as it melted and turned into "fuel debris." Later, the No. 4 was shut down for a regular inspection. When a tsunami triggered by the MaGreat East Japan Earthquake slammed into the coastal facility, reactors 1 to 3 were online, while No. And then I saw them, just 100 meters away or so: the buildings containing the plant's No.
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Getting off the bus, I looked east, over the Pacific Ocean.
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The trip began aboard a microbus, which stopped on an inland promontory running north to south at an elevation of 33.5 meters above sea level.