By HIROKO TABUCHI and KEN BELSON
Published: April 2, 2011
TOKYO — Highly radioactive water is leaking directly into the sea from a damaged pit near a crippled reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, safety officials said Saturday.
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Japan’s nuclear regulator said that workers discovered a crack about eight inches wide in the pit, which lies between the No. 2 Reactor and the sea and holds cables used to power seawater pumps.
The operator of the plant said that air directly above the water leaking into the sea had a radiation reading of more than 1,000 millisieverts an hour, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Although higher levels of radiation have been detected in the ocean waters near the plant, the leak discovered Saturday is the first identified direct leak of such high levels of radiation into the sea. Earlier Saturday, Mr. Nishiyama had said that above-normal levels of radioactive materials were detected about 25 miles south of the Fukushima plant, much further than had previously been reported.
The pit was filled with four to eight inches of contaminated water, said the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company. It was unclear where that water was coming from. Highly radioactive water has also been discovered in the reactor’s turbine building in the past week.
Workers will try to patch up the crack with concrete, the company said.
Saturday’s announcement of a leak came a day after the U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima plant had suffered a 33 percent meltdown. He cautioned that the figures were “more of a calculation.” Speaking from Washington, Mr. Chu also said that roughly 70 percent of the core of Reactor No. 1 had suffered severe damage.
The crisis at the nuclear plant has overshadowed the recovery effort under way in Japan since the 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami hit the northeastern coast on March 11. Earlier Saturday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan made his first visit to the region since last month’s disaster, where he promised to do everything possible to help. His tour came a day after asking Japan to start focusing on the long hard task of rebuilding the tsunami-shattered prefectures.
“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 on March 11. “Everybody, try your best.”
Dressed in a blue work jacket, Kan also visited with refugees stranded in an elementary school and then visited a J-Village about 20 miles south of the disabled nuclear plant. The training facility has been turned into a staging area for firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and workers from Tokyo Electric, which owns the nuclear reactors.
Despite the massive destruction in Iwate, Miyagi and other parts of northeastern Honshu, the largest and most populous of Japan’s islands, the government has also been battling to gain control of the damaged nuclear station. Tokyo Electric has struggled to find a place to dump water that has been contaminated during efforts to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools.
On Saturday, contaminated water was transferred onto a barge to free up space in other tanks on land. A second barge also arrived.
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