TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese military helicopters and fire trucks poured water on an overheating nuclear facility today and the plant operator said electricity to part of the crippled complex could be restored in a desperate bid to avert catastrophe.
Washington and other foreign capitals expressed growing alarm about radiation leaking from the earthquake-shattered plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo. The United States said it was sending aircraft to help Americans leave Japan.
“The situation continues to be very serious,” International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano told reporters at Vienna airport as he left with a group of nuclear experts for Japan.
Workers were trying to connect a 1-km (0.6-mile) long power cable from the main grid to restart water pumps to cool reactor No. 2, which does not house spent fuel rods considered the biggest risk of spewing radioactivity into the atmosphere.
One official from the plant operator told a late night briefing the cable could be connected within hours. Other officials said it was unclear if water pumps at reactor No. 2, which sustained less damage from a series of explosions, would work.
US officials took pains not to criticize Japan’s government, but Washington’s actions indicated a divide with its close ally about the perilousness of the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
The top US nuclear regulator said the cooling pool for spent fuel rods at reactor No.4 may have run dry and another was leaking.
Gregory Jaczko, head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a congressional hearing that radiation levels around the cooling pool were extremely high, posing deadly risks for workers still toiling in the wreckage of the power plant.
“It would be very difficult for emergency workers to get near the reactors. The doses they could experience would potentially be lethal doses in a very short period of time,” he said in Washington.
Japan’s nuclear agency said it could not confirm if water was covering the fuel rods. The plant operator said it believed the reactor spent-fuel pool still had water as of yesterday, and made clear its priority was the spent-fuel pool at the No.3 reactor.
This morning alone, military helicopters dumped around 30 tonnes of water, all aimed at this reactor. One emergency crew temporarily put off spraying the same reactor with a water cannon due to high radiation, broadcaster NHK said, but another crew later began hosing it.
Health experts said panic over radiation leaks from the Daiichi plant was diverting attention from other life-threatening risks facing survivors of last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, such as cold, heavy snow in parts and access to fresh water.
Inside the complex, torn apart by four explosions since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit last Friday, workers in protective suits and using makeshift lighting tried to monitor what was going on inside the six reactors. They have been working in short shifts to minimize radiation exposure.
The latest images from the nuclear plant showed severe damage after the blasts. Two of the buildings were a mangled mix of steel and concrete.
“The worst-case scenario doesn’t bear mentioning and the best-case scenario keeps getting worse,” Perpetual Investments said in a note on the crisis.
