Boiled dry: This shot shows of the inside of reactor number four at the Fukushima nuclear plant before the disaster. The spent fuel storage pool is seen at the front of the shot. The rods are at the bottom of the pool. Reuters / dailymail.co.uk

14 April 2011 (Asahi Shimbun) – Officials of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, are considering a plan to remove spent fuel rods from storage pools at its reactors, sources said. TEPCO workers began collecting samples of water from a storage pool at the plant on Tuesday to help assess the condition of the spent fuel rods and the feasibility of the plan. Under normal conditions, spent fuel rods are kept for many years in the storage pools to cool. They are then placed in airtight steel casks for removal. But TEPCO is having to improvise a method of moving spent fuel rods that may have been severely damaged by explosions at the reactors. The buildings housing the Fukushima plant’s No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 reactors have all been damaged, leaving storage pools exposed, and equipment normally used in the removal process may also have been knocked out by the explosions. High levels of radiation are also likely to prove a major obstacle to the removal effort, which sources said TEPCO has been formulating since March. … According to internal TEPCO documents outlining the plan to remove the spent fuel rods, metal structures will be constructed around the buildings housing the No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 reactors and huge cranes will be set up on those frames. The cranes would be used to lower airtight casks into the storage pools. Once the spent fuel rods were moved into the casks, the cranes would the move the casks outside of the reactor buildings. The casks could weigh as much as 100 tons, and TEPCO officials are unsure if the cranes will be powerful enough to move them safely. …

TEPCO considers plan to remove spent fuel rods from crippled Fukushima plant