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The destroyed area is seen within the exclusion zone, about 6km away from Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, on April 12. (Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images)
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), operator of the earthquake and tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, said on Sunday that it may be impossible to stabilize the reactors by the end of the year as originally planned.
After recently discovering that meltdowns had occurred at the No. 1, 2 and 3 reactors at the plant, which could mean damages to the pressure vessels that hold nuclear fuel, one TEPCO official said that “there will be a major delay to work,” Kyodo News reported.
TEPCO, originally saying in its April 17 "road map" plan that it was expecting to bring the reactors to a stable condition known as “cold shutdown” in six to nine months, is now expected to delay its stabilizing schedule. The return of evacuated local residents, which was supposed to take place within months after the reactors were brought under control, will also be delayed.
“The nine months is just a target deadline for which we are making efforts,” a senior TEPCO official said, according to Kyodo News.
TEPCO had its latest problem on Saturday night, when cooling pumps at the Fukushima plant’s No. 5 reactor stopped for about 15 hours, until backup pumps were activated.
When the interruption was discovered, the temperature inside the reactor had risen to as high as 202.6 Fahrenheit (94.8 degrees Celsius). Had the temperature risen another 10 degrees Fahrenheit for a prolonged period of time, the water covering the nuclear fuel inside the reactor could have boiled off, therefore exposing the fuel to air and creating the conditions for another meltdown.