TOKYO — Four out of six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were damaged beyond repair in Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, the chairman of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday.
Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata also said he is taking over daily operations at Tokyo Electric, which owns the crippled plant, because the company’s president, Masataka Shimizu, has been hospitalized for an illness brought on by stress.
Japan’s nuclear emergency
Shimizu, 66, has been largely silent since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami sent the Daiichi plant on a path toward nuclear disaster. Officials said Wednesday that he was suffering from hypertension and dizziness.
Also Wednesday, officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency urged the Japanese government to consider widening the evacuation zone around the facility. Recent radiation readings outside the exclusion zone show radiation substantially higher than levels at which the U.N. nuclear agency would recommend evacuations.
The comments could add to the debate over how far people need to stay away from the nuclear complex, whose cooling systems were crippled in the earthquake and tsunami.
Elena Buglova, an IAEA official, said radiation at the village of Iitate, about 25 miles from the Fukushima complex, “was about two times higher” than levels at which the agency recommends evacuations.
Japanese officials have told residents to evacuate within a 12-mile zone and to stay indoors within 18 miles of the damaged complex, but U.S. officials have recommended that American citizens stay at least 50 miles away.
The IAEA officials emphasized that the readings at Iitate were sporadic and only at one measuring point.
Denis Flory, a senior IAEA official, demurred when asked whether the agency was recommending that the village be cleared of residents but said it had advised Japanese authorities to “carefully assess the situation.”
Closer to the facility, contamination levels spiked offshore, and workers continued to endure soaring radiation levels as they labored to stave off a full-scale nuclear meltdown.
In the United States on Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration announced that minuscule amounts of radioactive iodine-131 — probably from Fukushima — had been found in milk from Washington state. The amount detected was “more than 5,000 times lower” than the amount that would trigger FDA restrictions, the agency said.
Tokyo Electric’s stock price has plummeted, and Japanese lawmakers debated this week whether to nationalize the utility, which is Asia’s largest electric power company.
Katsumata, appearing before reporters Wednesday for the first time since the earthquake, said the company would prefer to remain privately held.
He expressed his “deep apology” for the “grave accident” at the plant and for the “anxiety, concern, and inconvenience caused to the society over the spread of radioactive substances to the atmosphere, water, and the impacts on crops and drinking water.”
He said that reactors No. 5 and 6 at the plant can still operate, but “we have no choice but to scrap” reactors 1 through 4. Estimates show that dismantling and decontaminating the site could take decades and cost upwards of $10 billion.
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