Japan’s Prime Minister Says Can’t Let Down Guard Over Reactor

Bloomberg Business Week: Japan’s Prime Minister Says Can’t Let Down Guard Over Reactor

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan said efforts to bring the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant under control haven’t yet reached the stage where the government can let down its guard.

“We’re trying to prevent a deterioration of the situation,” Kan said in a public address in Tokyo yesterday. “We must continue to work with a high sense of alertness on each development.”

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said yesterday it doesn’t think there is a physical crack in the pressure vessel or containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor. There may be some kind of leak from the reactor causing high levels of radiation found in water in the basement of the reactor’s turbine building, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the agency, told reporters.

Repair work at the site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl has been plagued by explosions, fires and leaks of toxic material. Workers using fire engines have streamed 4,000 tons of water on the No. 3 reactor, five times more than any of the other five units, according to the government.

“Even if there has been encouraging news such as getting some power back to the site, the installation remains in an extremely precarious and very serious situation that has not yet been stabilized,” Thomas Houdre, head of reactors at France’s nuclear safety agency, told reporters in Paris.

Radiation Levels

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator, found water at No. 1 reactor with radiation levels 10,000 times higher than normal cooling water, company officials said at a press conference shown on a webcast.

A similar finding at the No.3 reactor delayed attempts to restore power to control and cooling systems. Three workers were hospitalized after stepping into water at the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor.

Tokyo Electric plans to drain radioactive water from the turbine building of the No. 3 unit where the accident occurred, spokesman Osamu Yokokura said. It has yet to determine how and when to do this, he said.

“The water that is coming out of that area is much higher in terms of radiation and this is obviously complicating the clean up,” said Tony Roulstone, an atomic engineer who directs the University of Cambridge’s master’s program in nuclear energy. “If it’s leaking out then they have to figure out some way to contain this water.”

Without Power

The March 11 quake, Japan’s biggest ever, left the plant without power needed to cool nuclear fuel rods. Japan yesterday advised more people living close to the nuclear plant to evacuate because basic goods are in short supply, while assuring them that radiation levels haven’t risen.

Radiation readings around residents living between 20 kilometers (12 miles) and 30 kilometers from the plant are falling, according to the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan.

An order for the residents to remain inside their homes does not have to be amended right now, commission member Seiji Shiroya said yesterday.

Should the reading for radioactive substances start to increase, the commission will advise the government to change the order for evacuation, he told a press conference in Tokyo.

Death Toll

The death toll from the quake and tsunami climbed to 10,102 as of 9 p.m. local time yesterday, with 17,053 people missing, according to the National Police Agency in Tokyo.

The spread of radiation to food and water supplies prompted bulk-buying of bottled drinks even as the government said the health threat remained minimal.

Changing weather systems were due to drive radiation from the Fukushima plant over the Pacific Ocean yesterday, Austria’s Meteorological and Geophysics Center reported, citing data from the United Nations nuclear-test ban treaty organization.

Wind will carry the radionuclides for a “short while” inland, the center said on its website. Reactors at Fukushima may have released as much as 20 percent of the radioactive iodine and up to 60 percent of the radioactive cesium that resulted from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, according to the report.

The maximum radiation reading reported so far at the nuclear plant is 500 millisieverts per hour, meaning a worker in the vicinity would receive the maximum-allowed dose in 30 minutes. Tokyo Electric said 17 workers had received more than 100 millisieverts of radiation since the crisis started.