– Nuclear Engineer: Fuel assembly damaged at Fukushima Unit 4 — It’s bent in shape of banana — Unknown if pellets poured into pool during removal — Tepco stopped English translations (AUDIO) (ENENews, Dec 19, 2013):
Chris Harris, former licensed Senior Reactor Operator and engineer, Nutrimedical Report, Dec. 19, 2013 (at 28:15 in): 88 fuel assemblies removed, of them 22 are the new ones that have not been irradiated yet, 66 spent fuel ones — and today a damaged fuel assembly was discovered and pulled out. I sent you a Tepco announcement, and it’s in Japanese […] they’re also not putting out any English translations of it, they stopped doing that. […] It describes not a straight-as-an-arrow fuel assembly as normally you’d see, but it describes one that’s banana-shaped. They did pull it out and took that risk, pulled it out – I don’t know if it’s been pouring pellets in the bottom or not – I suspect they got it out, but you can see its bent. They showed you a description of what it looks like. They didn’t show actual footage of it yet. And now we’re getting into some of the more difficult, the more nitty gritty stuff, where you can start having an effect like we’ve already described previously on your program. Getting the low lying fruit, we’re probably coming close to the end of it.
Full interview available here at 28:15 in (right-click and ‘save as’)