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Japan rushes to repair pumps to stop radiation leaks
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By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Kevin Krolicki
TOKYO (Reuters) - Exhausted engineers attached a power cable to the outside of Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant on Saturday in a desperate attempt to get water pumps going that would cool down overheated...
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Credit: Reuters/Kyodo
By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Kevin Krolicki
TOKYO |
Sat Mar 19, 2011 3:27am EDT
TOKYO (Reuters) - Exhausted engineers attached a power cable to the outside of Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant on Saturday in a desperate attempt to get water pumps going that would cool down overheated fuel rods and prevent the deadly spread of radiation.
Even one bit of good news was quickly dashed, adding to the growing despondency. Media reports said that a young man had been pulled alive from the rubble eight days after the quake and tsunami had ripped through northeast Japan and triggered the nuclear crisis.
It turned out that the man been in an evacuation center and had simply returned to his ruined home, where he lay down alone in a blanket.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has called the crisis the biggest to hit Japan since World War Two, sounded out the opposition about forming a government of national unity to deal with a crisis that has shattered Japan and sent a shock through global financial markets, with major economies joining forces to calm the Japanese yen.
Further cabling was under way before an attempt to restart water pumps needed to cool overheated nuclear fuel rods at the six-reactor Fukushima plant in northeastern Japan, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo and prevent more radiation leaks.
Officials expect to have power from outside drawn to No. 2 reactor first. Then they will test the pump and systems to see if they can be started.
Working inside a 20-km (12-mile) evacuation zone at Fukushima, nearly 300 engineers got a second diesel generator attached to No. 6 working, the nuclear safety agency said. They used the power to restart cooling pumps on No. 5. Reactor No. 6 was drawing power from a second diesel generator.
"TEPCO has connected the external transmission line with the receiving point of the plant and confirmed that electricity can be supplied," the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, said in a statement.
Nearly 1.5 km (a mile) of cable is being laid before engineers try to crank up the coolers at reactor No.2, followed by numbers 1, 3 and 4 this weekend, company officials said.
"If they are successful in getting the cooling infrastructure up and running, that will be a significant step forward in establishing stability," said Eric Moore, a nuclear power expert at U.S.-based FocalPoint Consulting Group.
If that fails, one option is to bury the sprawling 40-year-old plant in sand and concrete to prevent a catastrophic radiation release. The method was used to the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, scene of the world's worst nuclear reactor disaster.
Underlining authorities' desperation, fire trucks sprayed water overnight in a crude tactic to cool reactor No.3, considered the most critical because of its use of mixed oxides, or mox, containing both uranium and highly toxic plutonium.
Japan has raised the severity rating of the nuclear crisis to level 5 from 4 on the seven-level INES international scale, putting it on a par with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Some experts say it is more serious.
Chernobyl, in Ukraine, was a 7 on that scale.
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