Weapons-grade plutonium was found in the soil surrounding Japan’s crisis-stricken power plant yesterday, heightening fears at the facility, where workers have struggled for weeks to keep the nuclear lid from blowing off its damaged, leaky reactors. The world’s most serious atomic crisis in 25 years went from bad to worse after crews discovered traces of the material — a key ingredient in nuclear weapons.
“The situation is very grave,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said today. “We are doing our utmost efforts to contain the damage.” Still, plant managers downplayed the discovery of the plutonium 238, 239 and 240. The Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant, said only two of the plutonium samples taken yesterday were from the leaking reactors. The other three were from earlier nuclear tests, executives said.
“Plutonium found this time is at a similar level seen in soil in a regular environment, and it’s not at the level that’s harmful to human health,” insisted Sakae Muto, vice president of TEPCO. He added that the latest readings at the Fukushima Daiichi plant — crippled by a massive earthquake and devastating tsunami on March 11 — were similar to those found after nuclear testing abroad. But experts said some of the plutonium may have come from spent fuel rods at the Fukushima plant or from damage to its Reactor No. 3, the only one to use plutonium fuel.
“While it’s not the level harmful to human health, I am not optimistic,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency. “This means the containment mechanism is being breached, so I think the situation is worrisome.” Plutonium breaks down very slowly and can remain dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The plutonium discovery, from samples taken a week ago, was the latest in a string of sky-is-falling updates that has put Japan and much of the world on edge.
Clouds of toxic smoke, contaminated waterways and tainted vegetables from farms near the plant are just some of the headaches that pop up from day to day. Dangerous radiation spikes have forced temporary evacuations at the plant several times.
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Some of the so called ‘Fukushima Fifty’ have been exposed to 10,000 times the normal amount of radiation as they battle to cool and restore power to the damaged nuclear plant, according to the Japan nuclear and industrial safety agency. While the official death toll of the earthquake and resulting tsunami, which struck two weeks ago, reached 10,000, many of the workers at Fukushima Dai-ichi, who have also been dubbed the Atomic Samurai, were taken to hospital after coming in to contact with contaminated water.
Three men were scorched when knee-deep water sloshed down their boots and the contamination is believed to have come from one of the plant’s six reactors – reactor 3 – which is thought to have been cracked. The Japan nuclear and industrial safety agency official, Hidehiko Nishiyama, said there is a possibility of ‘some sort of leakage’ from the reactor, and he speculated that the unit’s containment vessel could have been cracked. He implied that the damage may have occurred in the reactor’s core, but that it was limited, and said: ‘Something at the reactor may have been damaged. Our data suggest the reactor retains certain containment functions.’ Other officials said the damage at Fukushima, located 140 miles northeast of Tokyo, could instead have happened in other equipment, including piping or the spent fuel pool.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano has said a rigorous inquiry is under way to establish the cause of a leak at the plant. Either way, with the levels of radiation so extremely high, it calls in to question whether the safety measures in place are adequate, where 536 people are currently stationed, according to Tokyo Electric Power Co. – the plant’s official owners – including government authorities and firemen. Workers are undertaking various measures to prevent the further release of radioactive substances into the air and beyond and 17 people already have been exposed to 100 or more millisieverts of radiation since the plant’s crisis began two weeks ago after the size 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
To highlight the extreme levels of radiation, a person in an industrialized country is naturally exposed to 3 millisieverts of radiation a year – 3 per cent of the amount the workers are currently being exposed to every hour.
In a televised address, Prime Minister Kan said this afternoon: ‘The current situation is still very unpredictable. ‘We’re working to stop the situation from worsening. We need to continue to be extremely vigilant.’ He thanked the workers, firemen and Self-Defense Forces for ‘risking their lives’ to try to cool the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.
The Japanese government has said that it will offer transportation and other assistance to those in a buffer zone around the plant, admitting that those people have been put in a ‘difficult’ situation. Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano said authorities are encouraging people living in the exclusion zone, between 20 and 30 kilometres (12.5 and 19 miles), from the plant to leave the area voluntarily because of the challenges they ‘have faced in their daily lives’.
As many scramble to escape the chaotic scenes and fall out, an immigration official confirmed today that more than 161,000 foreigners have left Japan since disaster struck two weeks ago – an eight-fold increase from about 20,000 in the same period last year.
Meanwhile tap water tested at four sites in the Ibaraki prefecture – located in the north east, 60 miles from Japan’s capital, Tokyo – all showed radiation levels above what is considered safe for babies to drink. Government data released today – and taken from samples yesterday in the cities of Tokaimura and Hitachi – showed between a low of 119 becquerels of radioactive iodine per kilogram of water to a high of 230 becquerels of the same radioactive substance.
While the country battle on as best they can, the official death toll passed the 10,000 mark today, and it is expected to rise for some time – the National Police Agency said more than 17,400 people are still missing. Those tallies may overlap, but police from one of the hardest-hit prefectures, Miyagi, estimate that the deaths will top 15,000 in that region alone. Hundreds of thousands of survivors are still camped out in temporary shelters, some 660,000 households do not have water and more than 209,000 do not have electricity. Damage could rise as high as $310billion, the government said, making it the most costly natural disaster on record.
