Over the next three to four months, TEPCO plans to establish an access route, conduct an internal investigation of the primary containment vessel (PCV), and obtain three-dimensional data on its internal geometry.<\/p>\n
The overall operation, including the subsequent collection and analysis of fuel debris samples, is expected to take approximately six months. TEPCO said, however, that the schedule could be extended as work will proceed with safety as the top priority. The actual trial retrieval of fuel debris using the robotic arm is expected to take place in 2027 or later.<\/p>\n
The robotic arm is approximately 22 metres long, or about 18 metres excluding the wand, and weighs approximately 4.6 tonnes. It was developed in cooperation with a UK company. Its deployment has been delayed several times due to factors including the COVID-19 pandemic and equipment problems, but the arm has now reached the stage where it can be used at the Fukushima Daiichi site.<\/p>\n
At a press conference held on the same day as the announcement, ONO Akira, president of TEPCO\u2019s Fukushima Daiichi Decontamination and Decommissioning Engineering Company and Chief Decommissioning Officer, said he felt that they had \u201cfinally reached this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ono said TEPCO intends to use the current operation to determine how effectively the robotic arm can be deployed and apply the experience gained to future fuel debris retrieval operations.<\/p>\n
TEPCO plans to use the three-dimensional data obtained during the investigation to analyse conditions inside the PCV in greater detail. The findings will be used to consider how future fuel debris retrieval work should proceed and how equipment should be deployed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the next three to four months, TEPCO plans to establish an access route, conduct an internal investigation of the primary containment vessel (PCV), and obtain three-dimensional data on its internal geometry. The overall operation, including the subsequent collection and analysis of fuel debris samples, is expected to take approximately six months. TEPCO said, however, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":8042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[1615,21,1616,23,1601],"class_list":["post-8039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fukushima","category-news","tag-fuel-debris-retrieval","tag-fukushima-daiichi","tag-robotic-arm","tag-tepco","tag-tepco-hd"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8039"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8043,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8039\/revisions\/8043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jaif.or.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}