Nuclear Meltdown

Choppers dump water on reactor

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-18 08:08

Fuyo Murakami (center) and her husband Yoshiro bid an emotional farewell to a relative on Thursday as they leave for Hokkaido in northern Japan after their town in Iwate prefecture was devastated. Jiji Press/AFP

TOKYO - Japanese military helicopters dumped water on an overheating nuclear plant on Thursday as US officials warned the situation was deteriorating.

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Four of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's six reactors have faced serious crises involving fires, explosions, damage to the structures housing reactor cores, partial meltdowns or rising temperatures in the pools used to store spent nuclear fuel. Officials also recently announced that temperatures are rising in the spent fuel pools of the last two reactors.

Along with the helicopter water drops, military vehicles designed to extinguish fires at plane crashes were also being used to spray the crippled No 3 reactor, said Mitsuru Yamazaki, a Japanese military spokesman.

The high-pressure sprayers were to allow emergency workers to get water into the damaged unit while staying safely back from areas deemed to have too much radiation. But the water failed to reach its target from safe distances, said Yasuhiro Hashimoto, a spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

While Japanese officials scrambled with a patchwork of fixes, the top US nuclear regulator gave a far bleaker assessment of the crisis than the Japanese, warning that the cooling pool for spent fuel rods at reactor No 4 may have run dry and another was leaking.

A Japan Self-Defense Force CH-47 Chinok helicopter scoops seawater to dump on an overheating reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Thursday. Reuters/Yomiuri

US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said at a congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from that unit's spent fuel pool. Jaczko said anyone who gets close to the plant could face potentially lethal doses of radiation.

"We believe radiation levels are extremely high," he said.

Japan's nuclear agency said it could not confirm if water was covering the fuel rods. The plant operator said it believed the reactor spent-fuel pool still had water as of Wednesday, and made clear its priority was the spent-fuel pool at the No 3 reactor. On Thursday morning alone, military helicopters dumped around 30 tons of water, all aimed at this reactor.