TEPCO’s Risky Operation at Fukushima - The Nation

[Sirveri]

57. I'm looking at the before pictures, perhaps they were pre-Tsunami

I will admit I didn't significantly source the date of the photo, so it could be old, but I haven't seen any casualty timeline where they took the time to cut a giant hole in the roof. I'm not sure why they would cut a hole in the roof for a refueling op, I always thought they had specialized loading bays to accept new fuel cell assemblies, but I have not toured this specific plant design. I was really hoping to get inside Vermont Yankee when I went out there for an interview, but we stayed in the office buildings, that plant was a similar model being an early generation BWR.

Yes, the pool did run out of water, that is part of the timeline.

The plutonium likely got outside plant boundaries because the cooling pool drained and then caught fire, fires in radioactive material have a 10% material uptake rate, which would have caused up to 10% of exposed MOX to go airborne as ash.