information about Fukushima published in English in Japanese media info publiée en anglais dans la presse japonaise
5 Avril 2013
April 6, 2013
AFP-JIJI, Kyodo
The system keeping spent fuel cool in the pool for reactor 3 at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant stopped Friday and was restarted three hours later, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
In the latest glitch at the crippled facility, an alarm sounded at 2:27 p.m. and technicians soon confirmed that the cooling system was not working, a Tepco spokesman said.
“We have no information at hand about the cause,” the spokesman said.
Although the breakdown was not thought to be immediately dangerous, it served as a reminder of the precarious state of the atomic plant more than two years after it was crippled by the giant tsunami of March 2011.
Last month, a power outage at the plant stopped cooling systems for four pools storing spent nuclear fuel after a rat interfered with the electrical flow.
As of 2 p.m. Friday, the temperature inside the reactor 3 pool was 15.1 degrees, indicating the spent fuel was stable and was not posing an immediate danger to the environment, Tepco said.
April 5, 2013
The cooling system for a fuel storage pool for one of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in Japan temporarily failed on April 5 for the second time in a month.
Nuclear Regulation Authority spokesman Takahiro Sakuma said an alarm went off in the afternoon about the problem at reactor No. 3 around 2:30 p.m. Nearly three hours later at 5:20 p.m., electrical power had been restored.
No sign of radiation leakage has been detected outside the reactor's building.
The plant went into multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami damaged backup generators and all cooling systems failed, including those for the reactors. The plant is being decommissioned, but continues to have glitches.
Last month, a power outage led to a cooling system not working for two days, and TEPCO later said it had found a dead rat near a switchboard and suspected that was the cause for the power going out at nine facilities at Fukushima No. 1.
Fears are growing about the safety of nuclear plants, and people have periodically staged streets protests that are rare in Japan.
Only two of the nation's 50 working power plants are up, and the government is running beefed up safety checks on the plants, including scrutinizing quake faults right below or near the plants.
Shinzo Abe, who became prime minister about three months ago, has expressed a desire to restart nuclear plants.
Japan lacks natural resources and relied on nuclear energy for about a third of its electricity needs prior to March 2011. Energy imports have soared over the last two years, putting a strain on the economy.
Fukushima reactor cooling system restarted
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20130405_29.html
Tokyo Electric Power Company says it has restarted a fuel pool cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after several hours of suspension.
TEPCO says an alarm went off at around 2:30 PM on Friday, signaling electric trouble at the plant's Number 3 reactor fuel pool. Officials confirmed the failure.
The pool contains 514 units of spent fuel rods and 52 units of unused rods.
The utility says the pool's temperature was 15 degrees Celsius at 2 PM and that it would take about 2 weeks to reach the in-house safety threshold of 65 degrees.
The utility says radiation levels at monitoring posts near the plant did not changed during the suspension.
Tokyo Electric says the alarm went off while workers were installing wire nets around an outdoor power distribution board to keep small animals away.
The utility says the nets may have accidentally touched the board.
TEPCO decided to install the net after a small animal, possibly a rat, touched a switchboard outside a building and caused a power failure at 3 reactors last month.
The trouble halted cooling systems at the reactors for up to 29 hours.
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