Japan battles nuclear crisis, power effort crucial

Fri Mar 18, 2011 4:20pm GM

By Shinichi Saoshiro and Yoko Nishikawa

TOKYO, March 19 (Reuters) - Exhausted Japanese engineers scrambled to fix a power cable to two reactors at a tsunami-crippled nuclear power station on Saturday as they fought to prevent a deadly radiation release in the world's worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster.

The dangerous and complex challenge for about 300 workers at the Fukushima plant in northeastern Japan, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, has unsettled the world's financial markets and prompted an international reassessment of nuclear safety.

At the plant, from where people within 20 km (12 miles) have been evacuated to avoid radiation, engineers were hoping to attach power lines to two of the six reactors in order to
restart water pumps and cool overheated nuclear fuel rods.

Workers also sprayed water on the No.3 reactor, considered the most critical after steam was seen blowing off, a sign the rods could be becoming exposed.

If those tactics fail, the option of last resort may be to bury the sprawling 40-year-old plant in sand and concrete to prevent a catastrophic radiation release, the method used to seal huge leakages from Chernobyl after a huge blast there.

Japan has raised the severity rating of the nuclear crisis from Level 4 to Level 5 on the seven-level INES international scale, putting it on a par with America's Three Mile Island
accident in 1979, although some experts say it is more serious.

Chernobyl was a 7 on that scale.

The operation to avert a large-scale radiation leak has overshadowed the humanitarian aspect of Japan's toughest moment since World War Two, after it was struck last Friday by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a 10-metre (33-foot) tsunami.

Around 6,500 have been confirmed killed in the double natural disaster, which turned whole towns into waterlogged wastelands, and 10,300 remain missing with many feared dead.

Some 390,000 people, including many among Japan's ageing population, are homeless and battling near-freezing temperatures in makeshift shelters in northeastern coastal areas.

Food, water, medicine and heating fuel are in short supply.

"Everything is gone, including money," said Tsukasa Sato, a 74-year-old barber with a heart condition, as he warmed his hands in front of a stove at a shelter for the homeless in Yamada, northern Japan.

Under enormous pressure over its handling of the combination of crises, Japan's government conceded it could have moved faster at the outset.

"An unprecedented huge earthquake and huge tsunami hit Japan. As a result, things that had not been anticipated in terms of the general disaster response took place," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters late on Friday.

Health officials and the U.N. atomic watchdog have said radiation levels in the capital Tokyo were not harmful, but the city has seen an exodus of tourists, expatriates and many
Japanese, who fear a blast of radioactive material.

"I'm leaving because my parents are terrified. I personally think this will turn out to be the biggest paper tiger the world has ever seen," said Luke Ridley, 23, from London as he sat at
Narita international airport using his laptop.

"I'll probably come back in about a month."

Amid their distress, Japanese were proud of the 300 or so nuclear plant workers toiling in the wreckage, wearing masks, goggles and protective suits sealed by duct tape.

"My eyes well with tears at the thought of the work they are doing," Kazuya Aoki, a safety official at Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told Reuters.

Even if engineers restore power at the plant, the pumps may be too damaged to work.

The first step will be to restore power to pumps for reactors No. 1 and 2, and possibly 4, by Saturday, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, Japan's nuclear safety agency spokesman.

By Sunday, the government expects to connect electricity to pumps for its badly damaged reactor No.3 -- a focal point in the crisis because of its use of mixed oxides, or mox, containing
both uranium and highly toxic plutonium.

That could be a turning point.

"If they can get those electric pumps on and they can start pushing that water successfully up the core, quite slowly so you don't cause any brittle failure, they should be able to get it
under control in the next couple of days," said Laurence Williams, of Britain's University of Central Lancashire.

The last-resort option of burying the reactors could leave part of Japan off-limits for decades.

FINANCIAL INTERVENTION

The Group of Seven rich nations, attempting to calm global financial markets after a tumultuous week, agreed on Friday to join in a rare concerted intervention to restrain a soaring yen.

The U.S. dollar surged more than two yen to 81.80 after the G7's pledge to intervene, leaving behind a record low of 76.25 hit on Thursday.

Japan's Nikkei share index ended up 2.7 percent, recouping some of the week's stinging losses. It has lost 10.2 percent this week, wiping $350 billion off market capitalisation.

Expectations that Japanese insurers and companies would repatriate billions of dollars in overseas funds to pay for a reconstruction bill that is expected to be much costlier than the one that followed the Kobe earthquake in 1995 also have helped boost the yen.

The plight of those left homeless by the earthquake and tsunami worsened following a cold snap that brought heavy snow to worst-affected areas.

Nearly 320,000 households in the north were still without electricity, officials said, and the government said at least 1.6 million households lacked running water.

Aid groups say most victims are receiving attention, but there are pockets of acute suffering.

"We've seen children suffering with the cold, and lacking really basic items like food and clean water," said Stephen McDonald of Save the Children, in a statement on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg, Nathan Layne, Elaine Lies, Leika Kihara, Joseph Radford and Chris Gallagher in Japan; Fiona Ortiz in Madrid; Writing by Jason Szep and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Daniel Magnowski, sourced :Reuters)


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Chernobyl disaster

The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and it is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

The disaster began during a systems test on 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the town of Pripyat. There was a sudden power output surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, a more extreme spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of explosions. This event exposed the graphite moderator components of the reactor to air, causing them to ignite. The resulting fire sent a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Northern Europe. Large areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were evacuated, and over 336,000 people were resettled. According to official post-Soviet data, about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.

The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry, as well as nuclear power in general, slowing its expansion for a number of years and forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive about its procedures.

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with the continuing and substantial decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. More than fifty deaths are directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers. Estimates of the total number of deaths attributable to the accident vary enormously, from possibly 4,000 to close to a million.[4][5] Despite the accident, Ukraine continued to operate the remaining reactors at Chernobyl until 2000, when the last reactor at the site was closed down.

For more information visit Wikipedia

Brilliant Greenpeace video on Chernobyl

"Chernobyl solution" may be last resort for Japan reactors

Fri Mar 18, 2011 5:01pm IST
By Elaine Lies

Tokyo(Reuters) - A "Chernobyl solution" may be the last resort for dealing with Japan's stricken nuclear plant, but burying it in sand and concrete is a messy fix that might leave part of the country as an off-limits radioactive sore for decades.

Japanese authorities say it is still too early to talk about long-term measures while cooling the plant's six reactors and associated fuel-storage pools, comes first.

"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.

"They (reactors) are kind of like a coffee maker. If you leave it on the heat, they boil dry and then they crack," he said.

"Putting concrete on that wouldn't help keep your coffee maker safe. But eventually, yes, you could build a concrete shield and be done with it."

Experts say the cores at the six battered reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, are likely to be safely contained, but worry about the cooling pools for spent fuel, one of which contains plutonium.

So far, authorities have failed to cool the pools, where normally water circulates continuously, keeping racks of spent nuclear fuel rods at a benign temperature.

Helicopters and water cannon trucks have dumped tonnes of water on the reactors, but still the water in the pools is evaporating and the rods are heating up. It is also feared that the quake has smashed the rods into each other, which could cause a nuclear reaction.

"It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete, but our priority right now is to try and cool them down first," a Tokyo Electric Power official told a briefing on Friday.

OPEN NUCLEAR WOUND FOR MONTHS

At Chernobyl, an army of workers conscripted by the then Soviet government buried the reactor in tonnes of sand, then threw together a concrete container known as the "sarcophagus" within months of the fire and explosion there.

It failed to set properly and it cracked, leaking radiation into the atmosphere and water. Partly supported by the damaged walls of the reactor building, it has had to be reinforced.

Under a new plan for Chernobyl, a massive structure will be assembled away from the reactor at a cost of billions of dollars, then slid into place over the existing sarcophagus.

Chernobyl-style methods would be even more difficult at Fukushima Daiichi, given the number of reactors involved.

As Japanese officials have said, cooling is still the top priority. Pouring sand onto hot fuel could theoretically produce glass, and that same heat would prevent working on a durable concrete shell.

That means the stricken complex is likely to become an open sore, leaking radioactive particles into the atmosphere, for weeks and possibly months before the Chernobyl solution could even be implemented.

Authorities say radiation outside the Japanese plant is not high enough to cause harm. Still, the 20 km (12 mile) exclusion zone around the plant may end up as a permanent no-man's land, a major problem for small, populous country.

A 30 km (19 mile) exclusion zone remains around Chernobyl.

Tokyo, though, is likely to remain largely unscathed no matter what happens because of its distance from the reactors, no matter how nervous its citizens may be.

It is not accidental that the nuclear plant was built so far away from Japan's biggest city, said Yuki Karakawa, international coordinator at the International Association of Emergency Managers, an extension of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"Those reactors in Fukushima are there for Tokyo's power and Tokyo's benefit, not for Fukushima's," he added. "After all, Tokyo is more than 200 kilometres away."

(Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Mark Bendeich and Daniel Magnowski, Reuters)