Workers scored a key victory Wednesday in their struggle to gain the upper hand in the weeks-long crisis at the Fukishima Daiichi nuclear power facility, though a top Japanese official cautioned that the fight was far from over.
At daybreak, authorities with the Tokyo Electric Power Company noticed that water was no longer gushing into the Pacific Ocean from the turbine building of the No. 2 reactor, one of six operated by the utility at its plant.
Radiation levels in the water tested 7.5 million times the legal limit on Saturday. On Tuesday, it was still 5 million times above the norm.
An initial attempt to pour concrete to fill up the 20-centimeter (8-inch) crack, through which this water was gushing, failed. And there were no immediate indications that the injection Sunday of a silica-based polymer dubbed “liquid glass” worked either — until Wednesday morning.
The apparent success in plugging up the cracked concrete shaft means that, as of Wednesday afternoon, there were no known major radioactive emissions into the air, water or ground.
Still, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano soon thereafter told reporters that the crisis — which has been marked by leaks, explosions and apologies since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out the systems used to cool the plant’s nuclear fuel — is not over.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, an official with Japan’s nuclear and industrial safety agency, said Wednesday that authorities are aware that other problems could arise, especially as excess water may still be flooding the No. 2 unit’s turbine building basement.
(Source: CNN)
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Japan cannot handle this alone. Nor can they be trusted with responsibility for the rest of the world, since they have been so devastated. Instead of the “international” community going to Japan to oversee and to stop the problem, they are bombing Libya to help protect against arab aggression, which is futile, because that is what arabs do for a living.