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Japan battles to prevent nuclear meltdown
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 14 - 03 - 2011

Akhir 1432 / 14 March 2011, SPA -- Plant operators were struggling to prevent a
meltdown at Japan's Fukushima 1 nuclear power station on Monday,
after a massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami disabled its emergency
cooling systems, according to dpa.
The plant's fuel rods were fully exposed for more than two hours
late Monday, the second time this happened in a day, the Kyodo news
agency reported.
The news increased fears that temperatures in the core could rise
to a level where the rods would melt their way through the core's
steel walls.
Operators from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) were
pumping water into the plant's damaged reactor. But officials said a
steam vent of the reactor's pressure container shut down, possibly
due to battery problems, leading to a sudden drop in water levels.
Radiation around the plant reached 3,130 microsievert per hour,
double the highest level registered so far. Japan allows an hourly
exposure of 500 microsievert, which is a measure of the biological
effects of radiation.
However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna
played down fears of a Chernobyl-style disaster - the worst in
nuclear history.
The old Soviet plant in what is now Ukraine suffered a meltdown in
1986, spreading radioactive material across Europe.
"The possibility that the development of this accident (turns)
into the one like in the Chernobyl accident is very unlikely," IAEA
director general Yukiya Amano told reporters.
"This is not an accident because of human errors or design,"
Amano, who is from Japan, added. "This is because of a huge natural
catastrophe which was beyond the imagination and experience of
people."
Amano also confirmed that Japan had asked the IAEA for help, but
said the details of the mission were still being discussed.
Japan's NHK television network had earlier reported that the water
being pumped into the plant's damaged number 2 reactor was unable to
fully submerge the four-metre long rods, which contain the uranium
fuel used to create fission.
While the risk of an explosion was "very low," officials
acknowledged that the rods may have been damaged and that some
radioactive material had been detected nearby.
Operators "are doing the very best to try to submerge the fuel
rods," Masahi Goto of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center in
Tokyo had said at a news conference earlier.
"The problem is the cooling system, as it was damaged by the
tsunami," said Goto, a specialist in nuclear containment vessels for
Toshiba Corp.
"If the fuel rods remain exposed for a long time under the very
fragile cooling system, that would lead to a meltdown," he noted.
The containment vessel, which encases the core, should protect the
environment from the radiation of a meltdown.
But there were concerns that the quake may have damaged the
structural integrity of the vessel at Fukushima, which is located 240
kilometres north of the capital Tokyo, in north-east Japan.
Two of its six reactors have exploded since the magnitude-9
earthquake devastated Japan on Friday.
Hydrogen explosions occurred in reactor number 1 on Saturday and
reactor number 3 on Monday, minutes after a magnitude-6.2 aftershock
hit the region.
The second explosion injured 11 people, including soldiers, TEPCO
said.
About 200,000 people have been evacuated from a 20-kilometre
radius around the plant. The government ordered those remaining to
stay indoors with the windows and doors closed.
The wind in Fukushima blew in an easterly direction during much of
the day, so any radioactivity would have been swept toward the
Pacific and not into Japan's interior.
But the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, said he expected
radioactivity to eventually be measured in the capital.
Singapore has already started to test food imported from Japan for
radiation.
The Japanese nuclear crisis has also prompted a number of European
countries to reconsider their use of nuclear energy.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country was
postponing by three months plans to extend the lifespans of its 17
nuclear reactors in order to run safety tests.
European Union energy ministers are also set to discuss nuclear
safety at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.


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