Japan plans to re-create meltdown to learn more about Fukushima crisis
Source: rt.com
A team of nuclear scientists in Japan plan to deliberately melt a nuclear fuel rod to model the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011. The experiment aims to find out exactly what happened to the plant’s three reactors.
“Results of the experiment will help us better predict the effectiveness of measures to deal with a nuclear accident, such as an emergency injection of water into a reactor,” the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) spokesman said, as cited by The Japan News. “There are no safety problems with the experiment itself.”
The meltdown project will be conducted at the Nuclear Safety Research Reactor in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, which started operations in 1975, and is designed to conduct these kinds of experiments. The agency said it will start making the capsule around April.
The test will see a 1.2-meter-long stainless steel capsule containing a 30-centimeter-long fuel rod to be placed at the core of the reactor in a way that the coolant water would not come into contact with the rod. This will recreate conditions similar to the Fukushima crisis when reactors lost water due to heat generated by the nuclear fuel. The JAEA also plans to install a camera inside the capsule to record the process.
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