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Hirose guided me inside the building containing the undamaged Unit 5 reactor, which is structurally the same as two of the destroyed reactors. To show the course followed by the Manbo, Tepco’s Mr. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident.

A $100 million research center has been built nearby to help scientists and engineers develop a new generation of robots to enter the reactor buildings and scoop up the melted fuel.Īt Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. The government admits that cleaning up the plant will take at least another three to four decades and tens of billions of dollars. In September, the prime minister’s office set a target date of 2021 - the 10th anniversary of the disaster - for the next significant stage, when workers begin extracting the melted fuel from at least one of the three destroyed reactors, though they have yet to choose which one. “Now, we are finally preparing for decommissioning.” “We have finished the debris cleanup and gotten the plant under control,” said the guide, Daisuke Hirose, a spokesman for Tepco’s subsidiary in charge of decommissioning the plant. Inside a “resting building,” workers ate in a large cafeteria and bought snacks in a convenience store.Īt the plant’s entrance, a sign warned: “Games like Pokemon GO are forbidden within the facility.” These days, workers and visitors can move about all but the most dangerous areas in street clothes.Ī Tepco guide explained this was because the central plant grounds had been deforested and paved over, sealing in contaminated soil.ĭuring a recent visit, the mood within the plant was noticeably more relaxed, though movements were still tightly controlled and everyone was required to wear radiation-measuring badges. About 7,000 people work here, building new water storage tanks, moving radioactive debris to a new disposal site, and erecting enormous scaffoldings over reactor buildings torn apart by the huge hydrogen explosions that occurred during the accident.Īccess to the plant is easier than it was just a year ago, when visitors still had to change into special protective clothing. Tepco is keen to portray the plant as one big industrial cleanup site. “Now that we have seen it, we can make plans to retrieve it.”

“Until now, we didn’t know exactly where the fuel was, or what it looked like,” said Takahiro Kimoto, a general manager in the nuclear power division of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco. Six and a half years after the accident spewed radiation over northern Japan, and at one point seemed to endanger Tokyo, the officials hope to persuade a skeptical world that the plant has moved out of post-disaster crisis mode and into something much less threatening: cleanup.

Now that engineers say they have found the fuel, officials of the government and the utility that runs the plant hope to sway public opinion. Scientists and engineers built radiation-resistant robots like the Manbo and a device like a huge X-ray machine that uses exotic space particles called muons to see the reactors’ innards. With radiation levels so high, the fate of the fuel remained unknown.Īs officials became more confident about managing the disaster, they began a search for the missing fuel.

No one knew for sure exactly how far those molten fuel cores had traveled before desperate plant workers - later celebrated as the “Fukushima Fifty” - were able to cool them again by pumping water into the reactor buildings.