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Japan focuses on hydrogen buildup after nuclear leak

06 April 2011 19:50 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Japan stopped highly radioactive water leaking into the sea on Wednesday from a crippled nuclear plant and acknowledged it could have given more information to neighboring countries about contamination in the ocean, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
Despite the breakthrough in plugging the leak at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, engineers need to pump 11.5 million liters (11,500 tons) of contaminated water back into the ocean because they have run out of storage space at the facility. The water was used to cool over-heated fuel rods.
Nuclear experts said the damaged reactors were far from being under control almost a month after they were hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said it had stemmed the leak using liquid glass at one of the plants six reactors.
"The leaks were slowed yesterday after we injected a mixture of liquid glass and a hardening agent and it has now stopped," a TEPCO spokesman told Reuters.
Engineers had been struggling to stop leaks from reactor No. 2, even using sawdust and newspapers.
Neighbors South Korea and China are getting concerned about the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, and the radioactive water being pumped into the sea, newspapers reported.
"We are instructing the trade and foreign ministries to work better together so that detailed explanations are supplied especially to neighboring countries," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference.
Experts insisted the low-level radioactive water to be pumped into the ocean posed no health hazard to people.
"The original amount of radioactivity is very low, and when you dilute this with a huge body of water, the final levels will be even lower than legal limits," said Pradip Deb, senior lecturer in Medical Radiations at the School of Medical Sciences, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University.
The government is preparing to revise guidelines for legal radiation levels, designed for brief exposure to high levels of radiation in emergencies and not cumulative absorption, for people living near the damaged plant.
Workers are struggling to restart cooling pumps -- which recycle the water -- in four damaged reactors.
Until those are fixed, they must pump in water to prevent overheating and meltdowns, but have run out of storage capacity for the seawater when it becomes contaminated.
Radioactive iodine detected in the sea has been recorded at 4,800 times the legal limit, but has since fallen to about 600 times the limit. The water remaining in the reactors has radiation five million times legal limits.
"What they are going to have to release is likely to be highly radioactive. The situation could politically be very ugly in a week," said Murray Jennex at San Diego State University, who specializes in nuclear containment.
Until those are fixed, they must pump in water to prevent overheating and meltdowns, but have run out of storage capacity for the seawater when it becomes contaminated.
Radioactive iodine detected in the sea has been recorded at 4,800 times the legal limit, but has since fallen to about 600 times the limit. The water remaining in the reactors has radiation five million times legal limits.
Martin Virgilio, a top official for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said at a House of Representatives hearing that the NRC did not believe that the core of Fukushima’s reactor No. 2 had melted down. Earlier, Democratic congressman Edward Markey had said the NRC informed him that the core had become so hot it had probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel.
COOLING REACTORS KEY
Japan is facing its worst crisis since World War Two after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami left nearly 28,000 people dead or missing and thousands homeless, and rocked the world’s third-largest economy.
It will likely take months to finally cool down the reactors and years to dismantle those that have been damaged. TEPCO has said it will decommission four of the six reactors.
Two Fukushima plants together provide 4 percent of Japan’s electric power and local politicians warn that reopening them will be politically difficult.
The key to bringing the reactors under control is the extent of damage to the plant’s cooling system, said analysts.
In a sign the cooling systems may be severely damaged, the Sankei newspaper reported that the government and TEPCO were considering building new cooling systems for three reactors to operate from outside the reactor buildings.
Japan’s fishermen, who are part of the politically powerful agricultural lobby, made it clear they were not assuaged by assurances that ocean radioactivity levels were low and safe.
"From now on, our fishermen will never cooperate with or accept nuclear power generation. I would like them to stop even those reactors that are now in operation right away," Ikuhiro Hattori, chairman of the Japan Fisheries Cooperatives, told NHK state television.
In Ibaraki, a prefecture south of Fukushima where prices for flounder and sea bream have plummeted, 53-year-old fisherman Yutaka Iijima told Reuters he worried about his future.
"The fact that we cannot work, that will have a big impact on us, and there is no end in sight to this."