>Japan gov’t demands quick action to avoid sea contamination

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TOKYO – Japan’s government on Monday told the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to move quickly to stop radiation seeping into the ocean as desperate engineers resorted to bath salts to help trace a leak from one reactor.
One official has warned it could take months before the nuclear crisis caused by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami is under control.
“We need to stop the spread of (contaminated water) into the ocean as soon as possible. With that strong determination, we are asking Tokyo Electric Power Co to act quickly,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference.
He warned that accumulating radiation from a leak that has defied desperate efforts to halt it “will have a huge impact on the ocean”.
In the face of Japan’s biggest crisis since World War Two, one newspaper poll said that nearly two-thirds of voters want the government to form a coalition with the major opposition party and work together to recover from the massive damage from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Underlining the concern over the impact on the world’s third largest economy, a central bank survey showed that big manufacturers expect business conditions to worsen significantly in the next three months, though they were not quite as pessimistic as some analysts had expected.
An aide to embattled Prime Minister Naoto Kan said on Sunday that the government’s priority now was to stop radiation leaks from the Fukushima nuclear plant, 240 km north of Tokyo, and that the situation had “somewhat stabilised”.

“How long will it take to achieve (the goal of stopping the radiation leaks)? I think several months would be one target,” said Goshi Hosono, a ruling party lawmaker and aide to Kan.

In their desperation, engineers at plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) have used anything to hand to try to stop the leaks.
At the weekend, they mixed sawdust and newspapers with polymers and cement in a so far unsuccessful attempt to seal the crack in a concrete pit at reactor no.2, where radioactive water has been flowing into the sea.
On Monday, they resorted to powdered bath salts to produce a milky color to help trace the source of the leak.
TEPCO is planning to put some sort of curtain into the sea by the nuclear plant to try to prevent radioactive water spreading further into the ocean. It has not decided what material to use.
The government has said three of the six Fukushima reactors were now generally stable. At least four will eventually be scrapped but that could take decades.

>Embattled Japanese power company chief hospitalized due to ‘fatigue’

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The president of the embattled utility that owns the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been hospitalized due to “fatigue and stress,” the company said Wednesday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. President Masataka Shimizu was hospitalized Tuesday. The company has not released further details about his condition.

Shimizu made a public apology several days after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the plant. The last time he was spotted in public was at a March 13 news conference.

Reporters peppered company officials with questions about the president’s whereabouts Sunday. A spokesman said Shimizu had been staying inside the company’s Tokyo headquarters.

His physical condition had been on the decline from overwork, the spokesman said Sunday.

News of Shimizu’s hospitalization comes a day after an inspector for Japan’s nuclear safety agency described austere working conditions at the plant.

Workers were sleeping in conference rooms, corridors, and stairwells on leaded mats intended to keep radiation at bay, safety inspector Kazuma Yokota said.

They were also eating only two meals each day — a carefully rationed breakfast of 30 crackers and vegetable juice, and for dinner, a ready-to-eat meal or something out of a can.

“My parents were washed away by the tsunami, and I still don’t know where they are,” one worker wrote in an e-mail that was verified as authentic by a spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Co.

“Crying is useless,” said another e-mail. “If we’re in hell now, all we can do is crawl up towards heaven.”

In a statement released March 18, Shimizu said the company was taking the crisis seriously.

“We sincerely apologize to all the people living in the surrounding area of the power station and people in Fukushima Prefecture, as well as to the people of society for causing such great concern and nuisance,” he said.

Meanwhile, tests revealed radioactive iodine at more than 3,000 times the normal level in ocean water near the plant — a new high, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said Wednesday.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said monitoring data collected Tuesday afternoon detected the I-131 isotope at 3,355 times the normal level.

The sample was taken 330 meters (1,080 feet) away from one of the plant’s water discharge points, the agency said.

Radiation readings from seawater outside the plant have fluctuated. They spiked Sunday, then dropped a day later.

Officials did not pinpoint a particular cause for the higher readings.

But officials and experts have noted that workers at the plant face a difficult balancing act as they struggle to keep reactors cool and prevent radioactive water from leaking into the ocean.

Water has been a key weapon in the battle to stave off a meltdown at the facility. Workers have pumped and sprayed tons of water to keep the plant’s radioactive fuel from overheating, and the plant is running out of room to store the now-contaminated liquid.

“They have a problem where the more they try to cool it down, the greater the radiation hazard as that water leaks out from the plant,” said Jim Walsh, an international security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

>Repair Work Resumes at Crippled Japanese Nuclear Plant

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Despite occasional sightings of smoke and steam billowing from damaged reactor buildings at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant in Japan, the effort has resumed to restore electricity and critical cooling functions. Radiation continues to be detected above normal

levels as far as 300 kilometers south of the facility, which was knocked out of commission by a huge quake and tsunami nearly two weeks ago.

After a break, because of concerns about smoke and radioactive steam, workers at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant on Thursday resumed the attempts to repair the cooling system at the Number 3 reactor.

That is the considered to be the most dangerous unit, because its fuel contains a mix of uranium and plutonium.

Video taken from a helicopter Thursday morning shows what appears to be steam rising from four of the nuclear facility’s six reactor buildings. However, authorities say the situation is not serious enough to continue a halt in the critical work to prevent a potentially larger catastrophe.

A re-emergence of black smoke at the Number 3 reactor halted work Wednesday.

There is also fresh concern about the damaged Number 1 reactor where pressure inside the reactor again increased.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano says crews are trying to maintain a delicate balance between spraying water on the radioactive fuel, which causes a rise in pressure, and reducing the water flow which could see temperatures increase to a dangerously high level.

Edano says experts are watching the situation closely and there is no evidence that the reactor vessel has been damaged by excessive pressure.

Since the March 11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which triggered a destructive tsunami, the nuclear power complex has experienced many serious problems. These include hydrogen explosions in reactor buildings, radiation leaks, exposed and overheating fuel rods, damaged reactor cores and shaking from powerful aftershocks.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant operator, has also revealed that it spotted 13 times, between March 13 and 16th, a radioactive “neutron beam” about 1.5 kilometers from the Number 1 and 2 reactors.

Some scientists say this means uranium and plutonium might have leaked from the plant’s nuclear reactors and the exposed used nuclear fuel rods have discharged a small amount of neutron beams via fission.

James Symons, the director of the nuclear science division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, expresses surprise and skepticism about the report.

“A neutron beam would be a beam of neutrons, which are a neutral particle. They are certainly produced in a fission reaction inside a reactor. But if neutrons escape and were to come out of the reactor they would not be visible. So you would not see a neutron beam,” he said. “Plus Ican’t imagine a process in which neutrons would be emitted from the reactor in a beam.”

The physicist says, at this stage, the Fukushima disaster has more in common with 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown, in the United States, than the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine.

“All these things are different. But it’s closer,” said Symons. “It’s certainly very unlike what happened at Chernobyl where the entire reactor exploded basically. It’s certainly very serious, but – as far as we can tell – it’s also coming under control.”

Radiation continues to be detected in the surrounding air, soil and sea water.

Japan’s government is now advising people beyond the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant to remain indoors. Officials say that, since the explosions, some infants theoretically may have accumulated 100 millisieverts of radiation in their thyroids.

Some scientists say those exposed to that total radiation dose should take potassium iodide, because an annual dose of 100 millisieverts is believed to be associated with an increased risk of cancer.

Japan’s science ministry says radiation levels detected in Tokyo have tripled, compared to those detected earlier in the week.

The Tokyo metropolitan government, as well of those of the adjacent prefectures of Chiba and Saitama, have announced levels of radioactive iodine considered unsafe for infants were detected this week in tap water.

That has prompted panic buying of bottled water.

Vegetable shipments have been stopped out of areas adjacent to the crippled nuclear power plant after some leafy greens were found to be contaminated with radioactive iodine and cesium exceeding government standards.