Japan aims to extract sample from remains of country's worst-ever nuclear disaster

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel visited a Fukushima coastal city to support the local fishing industry after China and South Korea raised the alarm over water discharge began from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. As Japan prepares to mark the 13th anniversary of its worst-ever nuclear disaster, the man in charge of cleaning it up says his team is fighting to bring a sample out of the heart of the site's radioactive debris. A decades-long project to clean up the remains of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is preparing to remove damaged fuel debris from the plant's reactors, but much about what's inside them is still a mystery. The key to unlocking that mystery -- and figuring out how to clean it up -- is a sample of melted fuel from inside a reactor, said Akira Ono, head of decommissioning for Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, in an interview with The Associated Press. Getting that sample would be like penetrating "the main keep of the castle" in the battle of decommissioning, Ono said.