Bodies of 2 Missing Workers Found at Japanese Nuclear Plant
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: April 3, 2011
TOKYO — The operator of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station said Sunday that two workers at the plant who had been missing for several days had been confirmed dead.
Tokyo Electric Power Company, via Reuters
In an image provided by Tokyo Electric Power Company, contaminated water from the crippled No. 2 reactor is seen leaking through a crack and draining into the ocean at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in northern Japan on Saturday.
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Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Naoto Kan prayed for tsunami victims in Rikuzentakata on Saturday.
The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the workers were found in the basement of the turbine building connected to the plant’s No. 4 reactor. The company did not say how the workers died. But various news media reports say the men lost blood and went into shock.
“It pains me that these two young workers were trying to protect the power plant while being hit by the earthquake and tsunami,” Tokyo Electric’s chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, said in a statement.
The confirmation of the deaths came a day after Japanese safety officials announced that highly radioactive water was leaking directly into the sea from a damaged pit near one of the plant’s crippled reactors. The leak was the latest setback in the increasingly difficult bid to regain control of the plant.
Although higher than normal levels of radiation have been detected in the ocean water near the plant in recent days, this was the first time the source of any leaks was found.
Because the government did not report the levels of radioactive materials in the waters near the plant on Saturday, it was difficult to judge how dangerous the levels of radiation were for fish or for humans who might come in contact with it. The government has already set up an evacuation zone for 19 miles around the plant, and fishing in the area has been suspended since the earthquake and tsunami.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Association, said it was possible that the leak was behind the elevated radiation levels near the shore found in recent days. The government announced Saturday that higher than normal levels of radioactive materials were detected about 25 miles south of the plant, much farther than had previously been reported.
The leak, found at a maintenance pit near the plant’s No. 2 reactor, is a fresh reminder of the dangerous side effects of the strategy to cool the plant’s reactors and spent fuel storage pools by pumping hundreds of tons of water a day into them. While much of that water has evaporated, a significant portion has also turned into dangerous runoff.
The Japanese authorities have said they have little choice at the moment, since the normal cooling systems at the plant are inoperable and more radioactive material would be released if the reactors were allowed to melt down fully or if the rods caught fire.
“It is our hope that we can stop the emissions of radioactive materials at the latest in several months” at the power plants, said Goshi Hosono, a member of the ruling party who is an envoy between the government and Tokyo Electric.
Three workers at the plant have been injured by stepping into pools of contaminated water inside one reactor complex.
Workers racing to drain the excess water have struggled to figure out how to store it. On Saturday, some contaminated water was transferred to a barge to free up space in tanks on land. A second barge also arrived.
“The more water they add, the more problems they are generating,” said Satoshi Sato, a consultant to the nuclear energy industry and a former engineer with General Electric. “It’s just a matter of time before the leaks into the ocean grow.”
Mr. Nishiyama said it was possible that water in the pit had leaked from the reactor, although it could have come from other sources, like leaking pipes. In either case, any leak would be exacerbated by the enormous amounts of water being used to cool the reactor.
Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University, said that the leak discovered Saturday raised fears that contaminated water might be seeping out through many more undiscovered sources. He said that unless workers could quickly stop the leaking, Tokyo Electric could be forced to re-evaluate the so-called feed-and-bleed strategy, in which they flood the reactors and fuel ponds with water and then release the steam that the hot fuel rods generate.
“It is crucial to keep cooling the fuel rods, but on the other hand, these leaks are dangerous,” Mr. Iguchi said. “They can’t let the plant keep leaking high amounts of radiation for much longer,” he said.
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Plant workers discovered a crack about eight inches wide in the small maintenance pit, which lies between the No. 2 Reactor and the sea and holds cables used to power seawater pumps, Japan’s nuclear regulator said.
The space directly above the water leaking into the sea had a radiation reading of more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour, Mr. Nishiyama said, a level that could be dangerous to humans. Tests of the water within the pit later showed the presence of one million becquerels per liter of iodine 131, a radioactive substance. That level of iodine is 10,000 times what is normal for water at the plant. However, iodine 131 has a half life of about eight days.
At the time the leak was discovered, the approximately 6-foot-deep pit was filled with four to eight inches of contaminated water, according to Tokyo Electric. But it was impossible to immediately judge how much water had escaped and over how long a period of time.
Workers had tried to fill the crack with concrete on Saturday, but it appeared not to be setting, Mr. Nishiyama said early Sunday. He said they would switch to using polymer to try to plug the gap later Sunday.
The crisis at the nuclear plant has overshadowed the recovery effort under way in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11 that started the problems at Fukushima Daiichi. The country’s National Police Agency said the official death toll from the disaster had surpassed 11,800, while more than 15,500 were missing.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan made his first visit to the region since the disaster, and he promised to do everything possible to help.
“We’ll be together with you to the very end,” Mr. Kan said during a stop in Rikuzentakata, a town of about 20,000 people that was destroyed. “Everybody, try your best.”
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