By DAVID JOLLY and HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — The work of digging out and rebuilding continued in Japan on Saturday, more than two weeks after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, as a top official said he could not predict when the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex would be brought under control.
While the situation at the damaged plant is not getting worse, Yoichi Edano, the government’s top spokesman said at a news conference, “this is not the stage for predictions” about when it will be over.
Workers on Saturday resumed repair efforts, restoring lighting to the central control room of the No. 2 unit, Tokyo Electric Power said. It was another step toward restarting the cooling system that shut down after the disaster. That leaves only the No. 4 unit without lighting.
They also began pumping in fresh water to the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 units, after days of spraying the reactors with corrosive salt water. The United States military was aiding the effort, sending barges with 500,000 gallons of fresh water from the Yokosuka naval base. Those were expected to arrive later Saturday.
The effort to restore crucial cooling systems and safeguard the plant has distracted attention from the humanitarian crisis along the northeast coast of Honshu, the main Japanese island, where a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami on March 11, wiping entire towns off the map and destroying infrastructure.
The government has said the cost of reconstruction could reach $300 billion or more, which would make it the most destructive natural disaster ever. And that leaves unanswered what will be the ultimate cost of the reactor cleanup.
In the capital, where some goods remain in short supply, the mood remains subdued more than two weeks after the quake, damped by the knowledge of the struggle at the power plant more than 100 miles north of the city and concern for the tens of thousands of quake and tsunami survivors who are only now starting to think of rebuilding their lives.
The National Police Agency said Saturday that the official death toll from the quake and tsunami had reached 10,418, with 17,072 listed as missing. Authorities have said the final death toll will surpass 18,000. There are 244,339 people in refugee centers around Japan, the police said.
Joy Portella, an aid worker with the United States-based group, Mercy Corps, in the town of Kesennuma, said that fuel shortages remained acute in the hardest-hit areas. The group spent Saturday distributing 2,000 liters of kerosene in the hard-hit town, she said. Damage to oil refineries across the country, as well as to ports and roads, has triggered a fuel supply crunch in the disaster zone, hampering relief efforts as well as leaving evacuees without a means of transportation or heat.
Still, Ms. Portella said that younger, more mobile families moved out of the ad-hoc evacuation centers, the demographics at the centers was shifting toward the elderly, raising the need for more specialized care. With much of the town and its industry destroyed, those left at the centers were facing up to the prospect of remaining homeless — and jobless — for the long term.
“No one I talked to had any idea when they were getting out,” she said. “The economy here is dependent on fisheries and fish farms. But those industries have been decimated.”
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday that a test of seawater taken Friday from a monitoring station at the plant showed the level of iodine 131 at 50 becquerels per cubic centimeter — 1,250 times the legal limit. That was up from 147 times the normal level on Wednesday, the agency said; it did not provide a precise level for Wednesday.
Drinking a half liter of that water would be equivalent to getting a 1 millisievert dose, the agency said, roughly the amount a person gets in one year from natural sources.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy-director general at the safety agency, said that he expected the iodine to dilute rapidly, minimizing the effect on wildlife, and pointed out that fishing had been suspended in the area after the quake and tsunami. “There is unlikely to be any immediate effect on nearby residents,” he said.
Japanese officials on Friday began to encourage people to evacuate a larger band of territory around the complex, amid signals that bringing the plant under control anytime soon would be difficult. On March 15, residents of the area in a zone stretching out to 12 miles, from the plant were ordered to evacuate, while those in a zone 12 to 19 miles were advised to remain indoors.
Mr. Edano, the government spokesman, said former Transport Minister Sumio Mabuchi had been appointed to advise Prime Minister Naoto Kan on the nuclear crisis.
The amount of radiation in Tokyo’s water supply continued to diminish for a third day after a big scare Wednesday. The city’s waterworks bureau said samples showed 34 becquerels of iodine 131 per kilogram of water at one plant, 48 becquerels at another and none at a third. Those were well below the government’s strict limit of 100 becquerels for infants and 300 becquerels for adults.
There was little news about the damaged Reactor No. 3, the only one of the six units at the facility to have mox fuel, a combination of plutonium and uranium. Three workers suffered radiation burns after stepping in shallow water in the basement of the turbine building attached to the reactor. A Tokyo Electric Power Company spokeswoman, Linda Gunter, said the company was pumping water from the basement, which is now as much as 1.5 meters deep.
“That water is being captured,” she said, “It’s not being dumped into the environment.”
The National Institute of Radiological Sciences said that the radioactivity of the water that the three injured workers had stepped into was 10,000 times the level normally seen in coolant water at the plant. It said that the amount of radiation the workers were thought to have been exposed to in the water was two to six sieverts.
That level of radiation suggested that radiation is escaping from the nuclear fuel rods, either through a crack in the pressure vessel or perhaps from a damaged cooling pipe.
Even two sieverts is eight times the new 250-millisievert annual exposure limit set for workers at Daiichi in the days after the disaster; the previous limit was 100. Tokyo Electric officials said that water with an equally high radiation level had been found in the Reactor No. 1 building.
Ms. Gunter said the workers would remain under observation for a few more days, but they are able to walk and do not appear to be harmed.
Hiroko Tabuchi and David Jolly reported from Tokyo, and Kevin Drew from Hong Kong. Chika Ohshima contributed reporting from Tokyo.
No comments:
Post a Comment