Cooling pumps still idle at imperiled Japanese reactors - Los Angeles Times

Progress restoring power to the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has apparently stalled after a full day of work Sunday, although the situation has not deteriorated any further.

Officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant 140 miles north of Tokyo, said they had managed to restore power to a switchboard at the No. 2 reactor at the plant, but have not yet been able to restore coolant flow in the reactor.

Meanwhile, Japanese health authorities have banned the sale of milk and vegetables from the prefecture in which the power plant is located because they have been contaminated by radioactive fallout, although officials claim the levels are not yet high enough to present a danger to human health.

Photos: Japan's crisis

After stringing a new power line to the plant from the electric grid, company officials reported on Saturday that they had reconnected coolant pumps in reactor Nos. 5 and 6 and restored the flow of water to the spent fuel cooling pools in those buildings. In the day since, temperatures in those pools have returned to near normal.

But those two pools had not been considered a significant threat. Authorities are much more concerned about reactors No. 2 and No. 3 and the spent fuel pool at No. 4. The reactor containment vessel at No. 2 may be cracked and venting some radioactive gases into the environment. Reactor No. 3 is the only reactor at the site that contains plutonium in the fuel rods and its escape would be extremely dangerous because it is carcinogenic in even minute doses.

And the spent fuel pool at reactor building No. 4 is thought to have boiled dry, allowing the fuel rods to heat up and become damaged, also releasing radioactivity into the environment.

Workmen have been spraying all three with seawater for several days in an attempt to keep temperatures down, but the water has combined with the steam and radioactivity to make it difficult for workmen who are attempting to reconnect power.

Contamination of foodstuffs in the area surrounding the Fukushima plant is a growing concern, particularly in light of the shortages of food that are occurring in the wake of the magnitude 9 Tohoku quake that rocked the area 10 days ago. The government had already said that it had detected contaminated milk at 37 farms in the area.

Photos: Japan's crisis

Now, authorities said they have also found contaminated spinach, canola and chrysanthemum greens. Monitors detected low levels of iodine-131 and cesium-137 on the leaves of the plants.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com