Meantime, officials were working to reestablish electrical power to reactor No. 2, an effort that would allow cooling efforts to resume in that facility, which has suffered less damage.
After so many days of dire bulletins from the nuclear plant, Saturday arrived in Japan with what passed for good news: There were no new explosions, no new fires. Radiation levels within the Fukushima Daiichi plant remain dangerously high, limiting the amount of time workers can be exposed before they run the risk of radiation poisoning. Still, intrepid workers braved the invisible atomic storm in relay teams and managed to attach a new electrical line to the blacked-out facility.
That doesn’t mean power is restored. TEPCO hoped to restore electricity to one of the nuclear reactor units by the end of the day Saturday, but many steps may be necessary before the full facility has power. Even once it does, the company does not know whether the cooling system that circulates water can be made operable.
U.S. officials want their own eyes on the situation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has dispatched 11 of its own technical experts to Japan in order to “shorten the information chain,” said NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.
Relying on the data the NRC’s experts collected, Commission Chair Gregory Jaczko stunned lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week when he said a pool at unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi plant no longer contained water to cool spent fuel, making it more likely that it would emit radiation. His comments contradicted those of Japanese and TEPCO officials, who continue to maintain that there is water left in the pool.
Other nuclear experts expressed frustration with the amount of information the Japanese government and TEPCO officials have released. “I think the Japanese government is sometimes not as forthright as they should be,” said Mark Pierson, a nuclear engineering professor at Virginia Tech. Pierson speculated that U.S. officials have access to information via military satellites that enable them to collect information the Japanese don’t have.
“The international community’s view is that they want more volume of accurate information more quickly,’’ Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said after meeting Kan and other Cabinet ministers.
Asked about public doubts that the government is telling the whole truth about the nuclear crisis, Kan said later: “We have been disclosing all facts that I and the cabinet secretary are able to get hold of regarding the power plant accident.”
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