March 16, 2011
By DAVID E. SANGER, MATTHEW L. WALD and HIROKO TABUCHI
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a far bleaker appraisal on Wednesday of the threat posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis than the Japanese government has offered, saying that American officials believe the damage to at least one crippled reactor was much more serious than Tokyo has acknowledged, and advising Americans to stay much farther away from the plant than the perimeter established by Japanese authorities.
The announcement marked a new and ominous chapter in the five-day long effort by Japanese engineers to bring the six side-by-side reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by an earthquake and tsunami last Friday. It also suggested a serious split between Washington and its closest Asian ally at an especially delicate moment.
The Congressional testimony by Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the commission, was the first time the Obama administration had given its own assessment of the condition of the plant, apparently mixing information it has received from Japan with data it has collected independently. Mr. Jaczko’s most startling assertion was that there was now little or no water in the pool storing spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation into the atmosphere.
As a result, he said, “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”
His statement was quickly but not definitely rebutted by officials of Tokyo Electric Power, the Daiichi’s plant’s operator, and Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.
“We can’t get inside to check, but we’ve been carefully watching the building’s environs, and there has not been any particular problem,” said Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric. Takumi Koyamada, a spokesman for the regulatory agency, said that as of 12 hours ago water remained in the spent fuel pool at reactor No. 4.
“We cannot confirm that there has been a loss in water,” he said.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Jaczko reiterated his earlier statement and added that commission representatives in Tokyo have confirmed that the pool is empty. He said Tokyo Electric and other officials in Japan have confirmed that, and also stressed that high radiation fields are going to make it very difficult to continue having people work at the plant.
If the American analysis is accurate and emergency crews at the plant have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled — it needs to remain covered with water at all times — radiation levels could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at reactor No. 4, but to keep servicing any of the other problem reactors at the plant. In the worst case, experts say, workers could be forced to vacate the plant altogether and the fuel rods in reactors and spent fuel pools would be left to meltdown, leading to much larger releases of radioactive materials.
While radiation levels at the plant have varied tremendously, Mr. Jaczko said that the peak levels reported there “would be lethal within a fairly short period of time.” He added that another spent fuel pool, at Reactor No. 3, may also be losing water and could soon be in the same condition. Japanese efforts to pour in water by dumping it from helicopters were suspended, for fear that the helicopter crews would receive too large a dose of radiation.
Mr. Jaczko’s testimony came as the American Embassy in Tokyo, on advice from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Americans to evacuate a radius of “approximately 50 miles” from the Fukushima plant.
The advice to Americans in Japan represents a graver assessment of the risk in the immediate vicinity of Daiichi than the warnings made by the Japanese themselves, who have told everyone within 20 kilometers, about 12 miles, to evacuate, and those between 20 and 30 kilometers to take shelter. While maps of the plume of radiation being given off by the plant show that an elongated cloud will stretch across the Pacific, American officials said it would be so dissipated by the time it reached the West Coast of the United States it would not pose a health threat.
“We would recommend an evacuation to a much larger radius than has currently been provided by Japan,” Mr. Jaczko said. That assessment seems bound to embarrass, if not anger, Japanese officials, suggesting they have miscalculated the danger or deliberately downplayed the risks.
It was not immediately clear how many people live within the zone around the plant that the United States believes should be evacuated. But the zone gets far closer to the city of Sendai, with its population of 1 million, which took the brunt of the earthquake last week.
At a hearing today, Senator Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed out that 50 miles could take in a huge number of people; San Onofre, in her home state of California, has 7 million people living within that radius, she said.
American officials were careful to offer no public comparisons to past nuclear accidents when discussing the Fukushima disaster. But clearly the crisis in Japan already far outstrips what happened at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a single reactor where very little radiation escaped a crippled reactor. The effort now is to keep the Japanese crisis, involving at least three reactors that had been in active use before the quake, and three others that were inactive but had storage pools for spent fuel, from escalating to the levels of the worst nuclear disaster in history: Cherynobyl.
Though the plant’s reactors shut down automatically when the quake struck on Friday, the subsequent tsunami wiped out the backup electronic pumping and cooling system necessary to keep the fuel rods in the reactors and the storage pools for spent nuclear fuel covered with cool water.
The spent fuel pools can be even more dangerous that the active fuel rods, as they are not contained in thick steel containers like the reactor core. As they are exposed to air, the zirconium metal cladding on the rods can catch fire, and a deadly mix of radioactive elements can spew into the atmosphere. The most concern surrounds Cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years and can get into food supplies or be inhaled.
Mr. Jaczko (the name is pronounced YAZZ-koe) said radiation levels may make it impossible to continue what he called the “backup backup” cooling functions that have so far helped check the fuel melting inside the reactors. Those efforts consist of using fire hoses to dump water on overheated fuel and then letting the radioactive steam vent into the atmosphere.
Those emergency measures, implemented by a small squad of workers and firemen, represent Japan’s central effort to forestall a full blown fuel meltdown that would lead to much higher releases of radioactive material into the air and the surrounding environment.
Mr. Jaczko’s testimony, the most extended comments by a senior American official on Japan’s nuclear disaster, described what amounts to an agonizing choice for Japanese authorities: Keeping sending workers into an increasingly contaminated area in a last-ditch effort to cover nuclear fuel with water, or do more to protect the workers but risk letting the pools of water boil away — and thus risk a broader meltdown.
The Japanese authorities have never been as specific as Mr. Jaczko was in his testimony about the situation at reactor No. 4, where they have been battling fires for more than 24 hours.
According to Tokyo Electric data, the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor contains 548 fuel assemblies that were in use at the reactor until November, 2010, when they were move to the storage pool on the site. That means that the fuel rods were only recently taken out of active use and that their potential to burn and release radioactivity is higher than spent fuel in storage for a longer period.
Experts say workers at the plant probably could not approach a fuel pool that was dry, because radiation levels would be too high. In a normally operating pool, the water provides not only cooling but also shields workers from gamma radiation. A plan to dump water into the pool, and others like it, from helicopters was suspended because the crews would be flying right into a radioactive plume.
Earlier in the day, Japanese authorities announced a different escalation of the crisis at Daiichi when they said that a second reactor unit at the plant may have suffered damage to its primary containment structure and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam.
The break, at the No. 3 reactor unit, worsened the already perilous conditions at the plant, a day after officials said the containment vessel in the No. 2 reactor had also cracked.
But in one of a series of rapid and at times confusing pronouncements on the crisis, the authorities insisted that damage to the containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor — the main focus of concern earlier on Wednesday — was unlikely to be severe.
At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday held by two subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said, “We think there is a partial meltdown” at the plant.
“We are trying to monitor it very closely,” he said. “We hear conflicting reports about exactly what is happening in the several reactors now at risk. I would not want to speculate about what is happening.”
Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.
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