(Daily Mail) The boss of the company behind the devastated Japanese nuclear reactor today broke down in tears – as his country finally acknowledged the radiation spewing from the over-heating reactors and fuel rods was enough to kill some citizens. Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency admitted that the disaster was a level 5, which is classified as a crisis causing ‘several radiation deaths’ by the UN International Atomic Energy.
Officials said the rating was raised after they realised the full extent of the radiation leaking from the plant. They also said that 3 per cent of the fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima plant had been severely damaged, suggesting those reactor cores have partially melted down. After Tokyo Electric Power Company Managing Director Akio Komiri cried as he left a conference to brief journalists on the situation at Fukushima, a senior Japanese minister also admitted that the country was overwhelmed by the scale of the tsunami and nuclear crisis. He said officials should have admitted earlier how serious the radiation leaks were.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said: ‘The unprecedented scale of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, frankly speaking, were among many things that happened that had not been anticipated under our disaster management contingency plans.
‘In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster.’ Nuclear experts have been saying for days that Japan was underplaying the crisis’ severity.
It is now officially on a par with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Only the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 has topped the scale. Deputy director general of the NISA, Hideohiko Nishiyama, also admitted that they do not know if the reactors are coming under control. He said: ‘With the water-spraying operations, we are fighting a fire we cannot see. That fire is not spreading, but we cannot say yet that it is under control.’
But prime minister Naoto Kan insisted that his country would overcome the catastrophe
‘We will rebuild Japan from scratch,’ he said in a televised speech: ‘In our history, this small island nation has made miraculous economic growth thanks to the efforts of all Japanese citizens. That is how Japan was built.’
It comes after pictures emerged showing overheating fuel rods exposed to the elements through a huge hole in the wall of a reactor building at the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant. workers at the devastated power station are continuing their desperate battle to prevent a complete meltdown which some fear could be as bad as Chernobyl. The latest pictures show a whole wall missing from the building housing reactor number four. Inside, a green crane normally used to move spent fuel rods into the storage pool can be seen. Underneath the crane, but not seen in the picture, is the 45ft-deep spent fuel storage pool which has boiled dry.
Officials at Fukushima are rapidly running out of options to halt the crisis. Military trucks are spraying the reactors for a second days with tons of water arcing over the facility. Engineers are trying to get the coolant pumping systems knocked out by the tsunami working again after laying a new power line from the main grid. And they today admitted that burying reactors under sand and concrete – the solution adopted in Chernobyl – may be the only option to stop a catastrophic radiation release. It was the first time the facility operator had acknowledged burying the sprawling 40-year-old complex was possible, a sign that piecemeal actions such as dumping water from military helicopters or scrambling to restart cooling pumps may not work.
‘It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first,’ an official from the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, told a news conference. But some experts warned that even the concrete solution was not without risks. ‘It’s just not that easy,’ Murray Jennex, a professor at San Diego State University in California, said when asked about the so-called Chernobyl option for dealing with damaged reactors, named after the Ukrainian nuclear plant that exploded in 1986.
Japan’s Self-Defense Force units have for the 2nd day shot water at one of the reactors at the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Work to restore power to the compound is also underway. On Friday afternoon, SDF units used special fire engines to discharge tons of water at the plant’s No.3 reactor. A storage pool for spent nuclear fuel rods has lost its cooling function, raising the risk of a massive radioactive leak. Water was also discharged by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, which runs the plant.
TEPCO’s office in Fukushima says that following the cooling attempts, radiation levels fell slightly 500 meters northwest of the No. 3 reactor. It says post-operation readings taken as of 2:50 PM stood at 3,339 microsieverts per hour, compared to 3,484 microsieverts at 1:50 PM, before the work began. TEPCO cautioned that the decline is small and a close analysis is needed before any judgment can be made about the effects of the operation. This is the 2nd straight day that SDF units have released water at the No.3 reactor. The operation on the previous day took place from the air and ground.
On Friday, work to restore electricity at the Daiichi plant also went into full swing. Securing an external power source could allow the reactors to regain their cooling functions, which are considered vital to put them under control. The Japanese government raised its rating on Friday of the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to the same level as the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency revised upward its evaluation of the severity of the disaster by one notch to Level 5 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Level 5 is the third highest on the 8-notch scale and the worst for any nuclear accident to have happened in Japan. The agency says it raised the rating because more than 3 percent of the nuclear fuel has been damaged and radioactive material is leaking from the plant. The disaster’s initial rating of Level 4 was the same as the fatal criticality accident that occurred at a nuclear fuel plant in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1999.
Tokyo Electric Power Company says it hopes to restore power to two of its troubled reactors by Saturday to activate the cooling systems in a bid to prevent the nuclear crisis from worsening. The utility company announced this at a news conference on Friday morning. At the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, three reactors lost their cooling capabilities due to a power outage and the failure of emergency power generators after last week’s earthquake and tsunami.
The company says it has been working to lay a new power line to the plant since yesterday. It is aiming at restoring the cooling systems at the No. 1 and No.2 reactors. It has so far installed a distributor panel at an office next to the No. 1 reactor. It is now trying to connect the power line to a transformer at the No. 2 reactor via the No. 1 reactor.
The workers are carefully watching radiation levels, which remain high — up to 20 millisieverts per hour at some points. Tokyo Electric says it hopes to complete laying the cable on Friday afternoon and to connect power lines to the two reactors by Saturday.
