In the first-ever delay in the plans to dismantle reactor 1 at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government and the utility have agreed to postpone the removal of fuel rods from the spent-fuel pool by two years from the initial plans, NHK reported Thursday.
The date of extracting the meltedfuel rods from the reactor core, which suffered a meltdown in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, will also be delayed by five years, the network said, without naming the source.
NHK attributed the delays to an unexpectedly time-consuming process of removal, which was to start in 2017 for fuel rods that are intact and in 2020 for melted ones.
In the ongoing plant dismantling process, removal of rubble, a necessary step to get at the spent-fuel pools, has taken longer than expected, with the plan to start full-fledged work to expose the reactor building by removing its covering delayed by half a year from the originally planned start in March.