The photos were taken on February 10, 2013, from a Kyodo News helicopter at an altitude of 1,500 meters. For the first time, the government allowed the aerial photographs within 3 kilometers of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant as long as the altitude is 1,500 meters.
Sankei Shinbun has an article (2/10/2013) with these photographs:
Reactor 4 building, with the steel frame being built (upper left) to suspend the crane for the removal of spent fuel in the future. The blue keyhole shape is the reactor well. The Spent Fuel Pool is covered with steel sheet:
Reactors 1, 2, 3, 4, from the right. Reactor 3 building is flanked by platforms for the debris removal equipment, where human workers observe the work in tungsten vests. When TEPCO holds the plant tours for the media, the highest radiation is usually registered on the road outside the Reactor 3 turbine building on the ocean side (lower left), at over 1,000 microsieverts/hour (or 1 millisievert/hour):
Storage tanks for treated water taking up the available space at the plant:
At the end of the article, Sankei says that at about 3 kilometer south of the plant at an altitude of 500 meters the radiation level inside the helicopter was 2.5 microsieverts/hour, but the radiation level inside the 3-kilometer radius at an altitude of 1,500 meters hardly registered at all.
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8 comments:
And instead of giving us some clear fly-over footage we get a few blurry stills.
Hi Ultraman,
Is the date of Sankei Shinbun's article right ? 2/20/2013 ?
Is it rather 2/12/2013 ?
Just for my translation...
Thank you.
Helios, thanks, it is February 10, 2013.
Very interesting, thanks. We had not seen a general view of the plant since the accident, I believe.
The tanks farms are expansive.
The auxiliary Unit 2 addition for removing spent fuel is massive.
They have done a tremendous amount of work. What's not done gives you some clues as well.
#4 has a perfect keyhole opening where the machinery pool was, and where the reactor was. This is where whatever blew up the #4 building resided - not in the SFP.
Notice they haven't touched the debris on the east side of #4 or the north side of #4 - that debris is presumably too radioactive to remove.
They have not touched the structure of Unit 3. They build a platform around it, bet everything is clearly visible as it was on March 14th after the core exploded. The SFP3 burned about a year ago, and is ashes now. Compare photos just after the explosion to now and you can see the burn.
On the north end of #3, you see the "pit" where the core fell from the sky and landed. No telling how deep that pit has now been dug, but it emits radioactive steam regularly.
Notice they have cleaned the entire roof of the turbine building except the area adjacent to #3. Too hot to touch, I imagine. They did patch up the perfect reactor plug shaped hole in the roof, however. Wouldn't want anyone to continue to remember that was there, would we...
Notice a difference in the area just to the west of #2 reactor building between the overhead view of the reactor buildings and the shot that shows all the tanks.
This is an area where a large fissure in the ground has opened up, and they've obviously photoshopped it - but inconsistently between the two views. try to locate the hedge polka dots on the hillside in both views and the line of trees going down to the road next to the reactors - it exists in one view and does not exist in the other - strange...
Anon at 8:10PM, at the time of the accident, there was no core shroud in the reactor 4. I don't think you would want to store hot fuel in the pressure vessel without core shroud.
As to Reactor 3, there is still spent fuel pool, it even has water.
I'm afraid you're only seeing what you want to see.
Yeah, really very interesting!! You really did good job and capture good viewpoint images. These are the best aerial photography.
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