Workers to Resume Water Dousing at Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant workers plan today to resume dousing the damaged reactor structures with seawater from fire trucks, following progress overnight to prevent a nuclear meltdown.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it will finish reconnecting a power line later today to the cooling system of the No. 2 reactor, above which white smoke or steam was observed wafting. Radiation levels there showed a consistent decline from the early hours of March 17 to today, Kyodo News reported, citing data compiled by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
The U.S. military, which is flying unmanned surveillance drones over the site at Japan’s request, is “cautiously optimistic” that the damage to the reactors can be contained, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command said. The risk of a meltdown has lessened after water was dumped on the site, said Thomas Graham, chairman of Lightbridge Corp., a McLean, Va.- based nuclear fuel developer and consultant.
“We’re optimistic that we’ll continue to progress in this, and that worst-case scenario will never be encountered,” Admiral Robert Willard told reporters by telephone from Hawaii. He said he has requested 450 experts to help Japan, and he will be traveling there March 19.

Water Campaign

Water cannons and helicopters were used to douse the plant yesterday as workers tried to stem radioactive pollution from the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Some water may have reached the No. 3 reactor, a Tokyo Electric official said last night. Engineers worked overnight to connect a new power cable that may help get Fukushima’s cooling systems working again.
“Everything depends on the amount of water Tepco can bring to the site,” Olivier Gupta, a deputy head of the Autorite de Surete Nucleaire, France’s nuclear regulator, said yesterday in Paris. “The Japanese operator has said it is trying to bring power back to the site. It’s clearly a positive move, but the power must supply something like pumps.”
Tokyo Electric’s failure to end the threat of radiation from the six-reactor Fukushima plant has prompted the U.S. to advise its citizens to consider leaving Japan and start airlifting some out of the country, while Australia has advised against travel to Tokyo. About 2.3 trillion yen ($29 billion) has been wiped from Tepco’s market value since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and a series of explosions devastated the 40-year-old power station about 135 miles (220 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

‘Somewhat Effective’

“We were able to see some steam,” Tsuyoshi Makigami, chief of nuclear facility management at Tokyo Electric, said at a briefing broadcast by NHK last night. “It’s fair to say that the spraying was somewhat effective.”
The company is constructing 1 kilometer of a new power line to supply electricity to the stricken plant, a company official told the press conference. The link is intended to restore power to the plant’s cooling systems.
Engineers had finished laying the line to Unit 2 at the plant, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement on its website. Power will be reconnected to that unit once the spraying of water on Unit 3 ends today, the agency said.
The agency said the situation at the three loaded cores -- reactors No. 1, 2 and 3 -- has been “relatively stable” in the last 24 hours. All three units are damaged and lack cooling, Director Graham Andrew said yesterday at a briefing in Vienna. The situation remains “very serious,” he said.

Fuel Rods

The greatest risks at Fukushima may come from the spent fuel pools that sit on the top of the six reactors.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said yesterday there is a possibility of no water at the No. 4 reactor’s spent- fuel cooling pool. If exposed to air, the fuel rods could decay, catch fire and spew radioactive materials into the air.
Helicopters are being used to determine radiation readings, water levels in the pool and damage to the reactors, Tepco spokesman Kaoru Yoshida told reporters in Tokyo yesterday. Technicians were unable to inspect the facilities because of high levels of radiation.
More than 320 workers were at the plant site yesterday. Tokyo Electric evacuated 750 employees on March 15 when radiation levels spiked.
The recent increase in employees at the Dai-Ichi plant could indicate that a work rotation is being implemented to minimize radiation exposure. Japan’s health ministry raised the cumulative maximum legal exposure for nuclear workers to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts on March 15 to enable workers to stay longer on the site to prevent a nuclear disaster.
Radiation levels have reached 10 millisieverts per hour in some parts of the plant, said John Price, a Melbourne-based consultant on industrial accidents and former member of the safety policy unit at the National Nuclear Corporation U.K.
“That means they have an access time of 10 to 25 hours at the most,” Price said in a telephone interview yesterday. “At that rate, you are going to go through workers very fast.”
The failure of backup generators used to pump cooling water caused explosions in at least three of the structures surrounding the station’s reactors, as well as a fire in a pond containing spent fuel rods.