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Workers enter Japan reactor for 1st time since blast
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By Mari Saito and Hugh Lawson
TOKYO (Reuters) - Workers entered the No.1 reactor building at Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Thursday for the first time since a hydrogen explosion ripped its roof off a day after the devastating...
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Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant's north side of No.1 reactor building is seen in Fukushima prefecture in this frame grab from video taken by a T-Hawk drone aircraft on April 21, 2011 and released by TEPCO April 27, 2011. Mandatory Credit
Credit: Reuters/Tokyo Electric Power Co/Handout
By Mari Saito and Hugh Lawson
TOKYO |
Thu May 5, 2011 2:43am EDT
TOKYO (Reuters) - Workers entered the No.1 reactor building at Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Thursday for the first time since a hydrogen explosion ripped its roof off a day after the devastating March earthquake and tsunami.
High radiation levels inside the building have prevented staff from entering to repair its cooling systems and finally bring the plant under control, a process plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) has said may take all year.
Those going in on Thursday -- two TEPCO managers and 10 contract staff from outside the company -- will spend 10 minutes each inside, connecting eight duct-pipes to ventilators to filter out radioactive material in the air, the company said.
"Groups of four will go in one by one to install the ducts. They'll be working in a narrow space," TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto told a news conference.
The staff will be equipped with protective suits, masks and air tanks and enter through a special tent set up at the entrance to prevent radiation leaks.
The company said two workers had entered the building first to measure radiation and 10 would follow to connect the pipes. The first two were exposed to about 2 millisieverts of radiation, TEPCO spokesman Yoshinori Mori said.
Under Japanese law, nuclear plant workers cannot be exposed to more than 100 millisieverts over five years, but to cope with the Fukushima crisis, the health ministry raised the legal limit on March 15 to 250 millisieverts in an emergency.
Radiation of up to 49 millisieverts per hour was detected inside the building on April 17 when the company sent in a robot.
REPORT RULES OUT NEW EXPLOSION
Tepco also said in a report issued to Japan's nuclear safety agency on Thursday that there was no possibility of another hydrogen explosion at the No.1 reactor due to progress in filling the containment vessel, an outer shell of steel and concrete that houses the reactor vessel, with water.
Workers have been trying to fill the reactors with enough water to bring the nuclear fuel rods inside to a "cold shutdown," in which the water cooling them is below 100 degrees Celsius and the reactors are considered stable.
The magnitude 9.0 quake and massive tsunami that followed on March 11 killed about 14,800 people, left some 11,000 missing and destroyed tens of thousands of homes.
It also knocked out all the cooling systems at the Fukushima plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, leading to the greatest leak of radiation since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
People living within a 20 km radius of the plant were evacuated and barred from returning home on April 21 due to concerns about radiation levels.
The Japanese government and TEPCO have come under fire both at home and abroad for their handling of the crisis.
Families at an evacuation center shouted at TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu when he visited on Wednesday, telling him to kneel down and apologize.
"I could live with this if it was all caused by the natural disaster, but this is a man-made disaster and we have to pay for it," one man said in exchanges shown on television.
"You told us for years that nuclear energy was safe. We believed you. Now look where we are," said another.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko told lawmakers in Washington on Wednesday that Japanese authorities were struggling to control the damaged plant.
"While we have not seen or predicted any new significant challenges to safety at the site, we have only seen incremental improvements toward stabilizing the reactors and spent fuel pools," Jaczko said.
(Additional reporting by Yoko Kubota in TOKYO and Roberta Rampton and Ayesha Rascoe in WASHINGTON; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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