http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18nuclear.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
U.S. Calls Radiation ‘Extremely High;’ Sees Japan Nuclear Crisis Worsening
TOKYO — Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan’s nuclear crisis, the authorities reached for ever more desperate, and unconventional, methods on Thursday to cool stricken reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in spent fuel rods.
He said American officials believed that the damage to at least one crippled reactor was much more serious than Tokyo had acknowledged, and he advised Americans to stay much farther away from the plant than the perimeter established by Japanese authorities.
The announcement opened a new and ominous chapter in the 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 a tsunami last Friday. It also suggested a serious split between Washington and its closest Asian ally at a delicate moment.
On the ground and in the air around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, 140 miles northeast of Tokyo, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces started dumping water from a helicopter on Reactor No. 3 Thursday morning, making several passes over the reactor as a plume of white smoke billowed.
But the measure — more often used to tamp down forest fires — seemed to prove ineffective because the water was blown off target. The Self-Defense Forces had planned to do the same for Reactor No. 4 later in the day.
But, according to the Japanese NHK broadcaster, they suspended the plan and instead prepared to use water cannons designed for riot control to direct high-pressure streams into the No. 3 from a range of around 50 yards.
The Japanese efforts seem to be focused on the No. 3 reactor — not on the No. 4 unit, which Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Wednesday pinpointed as a cause for alarm.
The Congressional testimony by Mr. Jaczko was the first time the Obama administration had given its own assessment of the condition of the plant, apparently mixing information it had received from Japan with data it had collected independently.
Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the reactors, was also working to complete a high power line to the plant to restore the electricity needed to run the cooling systems, according to a senior Japanese nuclear industry executive.
Both the Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police planned to deploy water cannons at the No. 3 reactor on Thursday, hoping between them to deliver some 42 tons of water — eight tons less than the government had said earlier that the unit needs on a typical day to keep spent fuel rods from overheating. 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, 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 definitively rebutted by officials of Tokyo Electric.
“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,” Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric, said Thursday morning in Japan.
Later, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Yoshitaka Nagayama, was more equivocal, saying, “Because we have been unable to go to the scene, we cannot confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4.”
At the same time, officials raised concerns about two other reactors where spent fuel rods were stored, Nos. 5 and 6, saying they had experienced a slight rise in temperature.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Jaczko reiterated his earlier statement and added that commission representatives in Tokyo had confirmed that the pool at No. 4 was empty. He said Tokyo Electric and other officials in Japan had confirmed that, and also stressed that high radiation fields were 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 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 melt down, 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, might also be losing water and could soon be in the same condition.
On Wednesday, 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 within 20 to 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 that 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 played down the risks.
Late Wednesday night, the State Department announced what it described as a “voluntary” evacuation of dependents of American government personnel in northeastern Japan, and down to Tokyo and Yokohama. The undersecretary of state for administration, Patrick Kennedy, said that no one would be ordered to leave, but that the government would provide charter flights for dependents who wanted to leave.
It was not immediately clear how many people live within the zone around the plant that American officials believed should be evacuated. But the zone gets far closer to the city of Sendai, with its population of one million, which took the brunt of the earthquake last week.
The warning followed advisory notices from several European countries urging their nationals to move away from Tokyo or leave Japan altogether.
At a hearing on Wednesday, Senator Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, noted that 50 miles could take in a huge number of people; San Onofre, in her home state, California, has seven million people within that radius, she said.
American officials who have been dealing with their Japanese counterparts report that the country’s political and bureaucratic leadership has appeared frozen in place, unwilling to communicate clearly about the problem’s scope and, in some cases, unwilling to accept outside assistance. Two American officials said they believed that the Japanese government itself was not getting a clear picture from Tokyo Electric.
“Everything in their system is built to build consensus slowly,” said one American official who would not be quoted by name because of the delicacy of discussions with Japan. “And everything in this crisis is about moving quickly. It’s not working.”
United States Air Force officials announced Wednesday that a Global Hawk remotely piloted surveillance plane would be sent on missions over Japan to help the government assess damage from the earthquake and the tsunami. A Pentagon official said the drone was expected to fly over the stricken nuclear plant.
