Nuclear chief: Japan is 'far from the end of the accident' - Houston Chronicle

The world's chief nuclear inspector said Saturday that Japan was "still far from the end of the accident" that has stricken its Fukushima nuclear complex and continues to spew radiation into the atmosphere and the sea, and acknowledged that the authorities were still unsure about whether the nuclear cores and spent fuel were covered with the water needed to cool them and end the crisis.

Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he saw a few "positive signs" with the restoration of some external electric power to the plant. But taking care to say he was not criticizing Japan's response under extraordinary circumstances, he said, "More efforts should be done to put an end to the accident."

More than two weeks after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, he cautioned that the nuclear emergency could go on for weeks, if not months, given the enormous damage to the plants.

The Japanese government also said Saturday that it could not predict when the nuclear complex would be brought under control. Yukio Edano, the government's top spokesman, insisted that the situation at the damaged plant was not getting worse, but said that "this is not the stage for predictions" about when the crisis would be over.

Amano, a former Japanese diplomat who took over the U.N. nuclear agency in late 2009, said in a telephone interview from Vienna that his biggest concern now was the vast amount of spent fuel rods sitting in open cooling pools atop the reactor buildings.

He said he was still uncertain that the efforts to spray seawater into the pools — to keep the rods from bursting into flame and releasing huge amounts of radioactive material - had been successful. If workers fill the pools with water but leave the cooling systems unrepaired, he said, "the temperature will go up," raising the threat of new radioactive releases.

He said he was particularly concerned about the pool at reactor No. 4, which contains the entire core of a reactor that was removed shortly before the disaster struck, and is particularly radioactive. "But the need exists for all of them" to be cooled, he said.

He also said he was concerned about radioactivity in the environment.

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The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday that a test of seawater taken on Friday from a monitoring station at the plant showed the level of iodine 131 to be 1,250 times the legal limit. That was 147 times the level recorded on Wednesday, the agency said.

The Japanese authorities played down the news. Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general at the safety agency, said he expected the iodine to dilute rapidly, minimizing the effect on wildlife, and pointed out that fishing had been suspended in the area after the earthquake and tsunami.

Amano said that he believed that the Japanese authorities were not withholding information, but that his recent trip back to Japan had been intended to secure from Prime Minister Naoto Kan a commitment to what he called "full transparency."

In recent days, American and international officials have said that the statements from Japan asserting that the nuclear cores and fuel ponds were covered with water were essentially inferences, based on how much seawater had been poured in and analysis of the radioactive steam emerging from the plant. But they expressed little confidence that much was known about what was taking place inside the buildings, with instruments still knocked out.

Workers at the plant began pumping in fresh water to reactors No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 on Saturday, after days of spraying them with corrosive saltwater. The U.S. military was aiding the effort, sending two barges carrying a total of 500,000 gallons of fresh water from the Yokosuka naval base.

The workers also restored lighting to the central control room of the No. 2 unit, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said, an incremental step in efforts to restart the cooling system there that shut down after the disaster. That leaves only the No. 4 unit without lighting.

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Damage to oil refineries across the country, as well as to ports and roads, has created a fuel shortage in the disaster zone, hampering relief efforts as well as leaving evacuees without transportation or heat.

Joy Portella, an aid worker with Mercy Corps, a U.S. group, said that fuel shortages remained acute in the hardest-hit areas. The group distributed about 500 gallons of kerosene in the town of Kesennuma on Saturday, she said.

Portella said that younger, more mobile families had moved out of the ad-hoc evacuation centers, and that the centers' demographics were shifting toward the elderly, raising the need for more specialized care.