The melted nuclear fuel of reactors 1, 2 and 3 of the Fukushima No. 1 power plant is being slowly cooled and a cold shutdown is likely to be achieved by the end of the year as planned, disaster minister Goshi Hosono said Thursday.
The government will declare that the facility has achieved cold shutdown once it confirms the complex can maintain stability over the next several years even if it is hit by an earthquake or suffers malfunctions, he said.
In the road map for the resolution of the crisis, which is updated every month, the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. said not only that the temperature at the bottom of the pressure vessels of all three reactors is below 100, but that the temperature inside the primary containment vessels of the reactors, where part of the melted fuel may be accumulating, was between 39 and 70 as of Wednesday.