CFS2
Here is the most detailed and up to date news, with actual facts...it appears that the doomsday predicted by some of the US news hounds is a bit off the mark...it appears that the Japanese authorities are indeed doing all that can be done..and some of it appears to be close to working..
Tokyo -- Japanese forces used helicopters Thursday and planned to bring in water cannons, part of their urgent and reconfigured effort to avert a nuclear disaster at its quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Officials from the government and the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said Thursday that cooling down the facility's No. 3 reactor was top priority.
Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa, in conjunction with Prime Minister Naoto Kan, said he decided early Thursday to address the crisis from the air and ground despite concerns about exposing workers to radiation.
"We could not delay the mission any further, therefore we decided to execute it," Kitazawa told reporters.
Helicopters made four passes in about a 20-minute span Thursday morning, dropping 7.5 tons of seawater each time on the reactor in order to cool its overheated fuel pool. Kitazawa said 11 special water cannon trucks, along with one from Tokyo's police department, should arrive at some point Thursday to spray water at the No. 3 unit from the ground.
While Kitazawa said "the criteria has been satisfied," other officials said they were still collecting to determine what effect, if any, the dumping of water had.
Since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami devastated northeast Japan Friday, officials have been working to resolve cooling problems at four of Fukushima's six reactors.
On Wednesday, Gregory Jaczko, the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress that spent fuel rods in the No. 4 reactor had been exposed because there "is no water in the spent fuel pool," resulting in the emission of "extremely high" levels of radiation.
But Japanese authorities disputed Jaczko's assertion, citing information gathered from a helicopter flight over the plant.
"We have been able to confirm that there is water in the spent nuclear fuel pool," a Tokyo Electric official said Thursday. "But we do not know how much water."
Also Thursday, engineers were planning to begin the process of restoring power to the stricken nuclear complex using power lines from outside. It lost power when the quake struck.
"This is one of the high-priority issues that we have to address," said an official with Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
Once the power supply has been re-established, the cooling system will be operated using seawater, he said. But he warned that the process will not be immediate.
"It will take time to restore the function of the main part of the facilities, because the pumps were contaminated by seawater and must be repaired before reuse," he said, adding that temporary pumps would be used initially.
A Japanese government spokesman, Noriyuki Shikata, warded off fears of an imminent meltdown, telling CNN Thursday, "We have not seen a major breach of containment" at any of the plant's troubled nuclear reactors.
A meltdown occurs when nuclear fuel rods cannot be cooled and the nuclear core melts. In the worst-case scenario, the fuel can spill out of the containment unit and spread radioactivity through the air and water.
That, public health officials say, can cause both immediate and long-term health problems, including radiation poisoning and cancer.
Asked about the report of a high level of radioactivity near the plants -- which may be related to at least a partial meltdown in some reactors -- Shikata said, "We have not seen the level that is, for example, dangerous to human bodies beyond the very close vicinity of the reactors."
Experts and Japanese authorities feared that overheating and evaporation of water in spent fuel pools around the plant could lead to the release of further radiation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said the temperature of water in spent fuel pools is typically kept below 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit). That requires a constant cooling source, which requires a constant power source -- both unavailable at the damaged plant.
"The concern about the spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi is that sources of power to cool the pools may have been compromised," the agency, whose chief Yukiya Amano is heading to Japan, said.
On Tuesday, temperatures at the the fuel pools in Unit 4, 5 and 6 all registered far above the recommended levels: 84 degrees C; 60.4 degrees C and 58.5 degrees C respectively, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said.
By the following day, it was reporting "no data" for Unit 4 and worrying trends for the other two:
Unit 5 had risen to 62.7 degrees C and Unit 6 to 60 degrees C.
The water in the fuel pool served to both cool the uranium fuel and shield it. But once the uranium fuel was no longer covered by water, the zirconium cladding that encases the fuel rods heated, generating hydrogen, said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former official with the Department of Energy.
That caught fire, resulting in a situation that is "very, very serious," he told CNN.
He said the next step may involve the remaining 180 nuclear plant workers taking heroic acts.
"This is a situation where people may be called in to sacrifice their lives," Alvarez said. " It's very difficult for me to contemplate that but it's, it may have reached that point."
Beyond guarding against further contamination, a parallel focus Thursday was determining how much radiation had already seeped into the atmosphere.
Tests on tap water in Fukushima city, 80 kilometers (50 miles) away, found radiation, though at levels not harmful to the human body, and later tests showed no radiation in the water, Japanese government officials said.
In Washington, U.S. military officials said they had deployed a plane to assist in detecting radioactive materials in the atmosphere around Japan.
About 200,000 people living within a 20-kilometer radius of the plant have been evacuated; those living 20 to 30 kilometers from the site have been told to remain inside. Authorities also have banned flights over the area.
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