Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) says it has successfully removed the first set of nuclear fuel rods from the cooling pool in Building Four of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.  The early milestone isn’t doing much to ease criticism that the disaster is much worse than TEPCO and Japan have let on.

TEPCO is moving unused fuel rods first, because they are less fragile.  The rods are slowly moved out of the pool on the fifth floor of the heavily damaged building and into a portable cask, and from there will be taken to a more secure pool on the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s grounds.  Building Four’s cooling pool contains 202 new fuel rods and 1,331 spent fuel assemblies.  If the rods were to break, touch, or overheat, it could trigger a self-sustained nuclear reaction even worse than the meltdowns in the other reactor buildings. 

And that’s saying something, because the situation in the other reactor buildings is horrible.  The reactors’ fuel cores melted through their containment vessels, and no one actually knows where they are, how deeply they’ve melted through the reactor floors or into the ground.  Building Three’s radiation level is so high, humans cannot even enter it at all – it would an instant death sentence.  And they’re saying a mistake in Building Four would be even worse.

“I doubt if Fukushima Dai-ichi's full decommissioning is possible.  Its contamination is so widespread,” said Masashi Goto, the engineer who designed Reactor Three and professor at the prestigious Meiji University in Tokyo, who favors the idea of burying the site in a concrete sarcophagus, as was done in Chernobyl.  But others say that wouldn’t be effective because of the widespread underground contamination caused by the melted cores.

“If you just put concrete over this, groundwater still will be flowing and things like that, and you have an uncontrolled situation,” said Lake Barrett, a former US nuclear regulator who directed the Three Mile Island cleanup and now is an outside adviser to TEPCO.  “I just don't see that as a plausible option.”

TEPCO has a plan to somehow “freeze” the soil on Fukushima Daiichi’s eastern perimeter, creating a wall that would prevent contaminated groundwater from continually leaking into the Pacific Ocean.  Critics doubt such a thing can be maintained as long as the area remains contaminated.

Freezing that amount of soil, says Dr. Suh Kune-yull, Professor of Nuclear Engineering at Seoul National University, “sounds more like a sci-fi story, science fiction.  We call this permafrost – frosting the soil – for 50 years and as long as 10,000 years.  It’s longer than human history, it’s just unrealistic.”