TOKYO — A U.S. nuclear regulator said Saturday it had registered improvements in the condition of a spent fuel pool at a damaged Japanese nuclear power plant that some experts warned could trigger a major catastrophe. TOKYO — A U.S.
TOKYO — A U.S. nuclear regulator said Saturday it had registered improvements in the condition of a spent fuel pool at a damaged Japanese nuclear power plant that some experts warned could trigger a major catastrophe.
“They clearly made efforts to stabilize the structure (of the pool)” of reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Allison Macfar-lane told a news conference in Koriyama city, 37 miles west of the plant.
The plant suffered meltdowns at three of its six reactors after it was hit by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Macfarlane, who was attending an international conference on nuclear safety in the city, made the remarks after visiting the complex on the previous day.
She said she had a chance to look at the reactor building of unit 4 and the reinforcement work conducted to support the structure of the pool, the Kyodo News agency reported.
Fears about the reactor have grown as its building holds a storage pool filled with 1,535 nuclear fuel rod assemblies.
The pool, which is 98.4 feet above ground, has been left uncovered since a hydrogen blast last year blew off the upper part of the outer wall of the containment building.
Most of the assemblies are spent fuel rods with a total amount of radioactive caesium equal to 5,000 atomic bombs of the kind that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in the closing days of World War II, according to Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the Fukushima plant, said recently it would aim to complete the removal of all fuel assemblies inside the reactor by the end of 2014, a year earlier than initially planned.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano, who also visited the plant for the second time since the disaster Thursday, said while the situation had “improved a lot,” there were still many issues that needed to be dealt with.
At the conference, organized by the Japanese government and the IAEA, the agency agreed with the Fukushima prefectural government to work closely on decontamination and radiation monitoring work in the aftermath of the disaster.
