AP, TOKYO
Emergency workers struggling to pump contaminated water from Japan’s stricken nuclear complex fled from one of the troubled reactors yesterday after reporting a huge increase in radioactivity — a spike that officials later apologetically said was inaccurate.
The apology last night came after employees earlier fled the complex’s Unit 2 reactor when a reading showed radiation levels had reached 10 million times higher than normal in the reactor’s cooling system.
Officials said they were so high that the worker taking the measurements had withdrawn before taking a second reading.
However, plant operators said that while the water was contaminated with radiation, the extremely high reading was a mistake.
“The number is not credible,” Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) spokesman Takashi Kurita said. “We are very sorry.”
He said officials were taking another sample to get accurate levels, but did not know when the results would be announced.
The situation came as officials acknowledged there was radioactive water in all four of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant’s most troubled reactors and as airborne radiation in Unit 2 measured 1,000 millisieverts per hour — four times the limit deemed safe by the government, Kurita said.
Officials said they still don’t know where the radioactive water is coming from, though government spokesman Yukio Edano has said some is “almost certainly” seeping from a cracked reactor core in one of the units.
While the discovery of the high radiation levels — and the evacuation of workers from one reactor unit — again delayed efforts to bring the deeply troubled complex under control, Edano insisted the situation had partially stabilized.
“We have somewhat prevented the situation from turning worse,” he told reporters yesterday evening. “But the prospects are not improving in a straight line and we’ve expected twists and turns.”
The discovery over the last three days of radioactive water has been a major setback in the mission to get the plant’s crucial cooling systems operating more than two weeks after a massive earthquake and tsunami.
The magnitude 9 quake off Japan’s northeast coast on March 11 triggered a tsunami that barreled onshore and disabled the Fukushima plant, complicating an immense humanitarian disaster.
The death toll from the twin disasters stood at 10,668 on Sunday, with more than 16,574 people missing, police said. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless.
Workers have been scrambling to remove the radioactive water from the four units and find a safe place to store it, TEPCO officials said.
The protracted nuclear crisis has spurred concerns about the safety of food and water in Japan, which is a prime source of seafood for some countries. Radiation has been found in food, seawater and even tap water supplies in Tokyo.
Just outside the coastal Fukushima plant, radioactivity in seawater tested about 1,250 times higher than normal last week — but that number had climbed to 1,850 times normal by the weekend.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, a nuclear safety official, said the increase was a concern, but also said the area is not a source of seafood and that the contamination posed no immediate threat to human health.
Experts with the International Atomic Energy Agency said the ocean would quickly dilute the worst contamination.
Up to 600 people are working inside the plant in shifts. Nuclear safety officials say workers’ time inside the crippled units is closely monitored to minimize their exposure to radioactivity, but two workers were hospitalized on Thursday when they suffered burns after stepping into contaminated water.
Edano has urged TEPCO to be more transparent about the potential dangers after the safety agency revealed the plant operator was aware of high radiation levels in the air in Unit 3 several days before the two workers suffered burns there.
TAIWANESE DETECTORS
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection said yesterday it was running short of radiation detectors to screen goods imported from Japan for signs of radiation contamination.
Taiwan has never before performed radiation screening on such a comprehensive scale, bureau Deputy Director-General Huang Lai-ho (黃來和) said.
As of March 21, there were only two working detectors at the bureau’s disposal, Huang said, forcing the bureau into the position of having to borrow 19 detectors the following day from state-run Taiwan Power Co (台電).
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
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