Japan battles nuclear crisis, power effort crucial
TOKYO |
TOKYO (Reuters) - Exhausted engineers scrambled to fix a power cable to two reactors at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear station on Saturday in a race to prevent deadly radiation from an accident now rated at least as bad as America's Three Mile Island in 1979..
In a crude tactic underlining authorities' desperation, fire engines also sprayed water overnight on a third reactor deemed to be in the most critical state at the Fukushima plant in northeastern Japan, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.
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The unprecedented multiple crisis of earthquake, tsunami and radiation leak has unsettled world financial markets, prompted international reassessment of nuclear safety and given the Asian nation its toughest time since World War Two.
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It has also stirred unhappy memories of Japan's past nuclear nightmare -- the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
At Fukushima, nearly 300 engineers were working inside a 20 km (12 miles) evacuation zone. Their focus is on attaching power lines to two of the six reactors in order to restart water pumps and cool overheated nuclear fuel rods.
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"Once we have an electric power supply, we will go slowly and carefully through the plant checking the various machines to see what is working and to also avoid short-circuiting them," a nuclear safety agency official said in the latest of round-the-clock briefings.
If those tactics fail, the option of last resort may be to bury the sprawling 40-year-old plant in sand and concrete to prevent a catastrophic radiation release. That method was used to seal huge leakages from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
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Japan has raised the severity rating of the nuclear crisis from level 4 to level 5 on the seven-level INES international scale, putting it on a par with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, although some experts say it is more serious.
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Chernobyl, in Ukraine, was a 7 on that scale.
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The U.N. Atomic agency at least said the situation in Japan was not deteriorating despite remaining "very serious."
The operation to avert a large-scale radiation leak has overshadowed the humanitarian aftermath of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and 10-meter (33-foot) tsunami that struck on March 11.
Nearly 7,000 people have been confirmed killed in the double natural disaster, which turned whole towns into waterlogged and debris-shrouded wastelands.
Another 10,700 people are missing with many feared dead.
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Some 390,000 people, including many among Japan's aging population, are homeless and battling near-freezing temperatures in shelters in northeastern coastal areas.
Food, water, medicine and heating fuel are in short supply.
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