Officials said Friday they are investigating possible damage to the reactor vessel at unit 3 that could be allowing dangerous radiation to leak into the atmosphere.
Government authorities said they are analyzing the reactor’s vessel, pipes and valves for potential damage that could be causing a leak. That reactor is considered particularly dangerous because it is the only one that burns mox fuel, a combination of plutonium and uranium that is hotter than conventional uranium reactors.
“Looking at the data, we believe the No. 3 vessel still has the capacity to contain radioactive material,” Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a news conference. “But we have to investigate … the possibility the No. 3 reactor has sustained damage.”
The setback is the latest in a fitful effort to contain nuclear fallout at the Daiichi power plant. Crews have attached power cables to try to restore electricity, but only two of the six facility’s six reactors have successfully been put into cold shutdown. Twice this week, workers were evacuated after smoke was seen rising from the buildings, though officials later said the smoke was caused by steam that is not harmful.
The nervous uncertainty over the food chain Thursday sent people sifting through information about the complicated and rapidly changing problem. In Chiba and Saitama, two prefectures neighboring Tokyo, officials discovered iodine levels exceeding the legal limit for infants. Yet Tokyo’s water, which had tested high a day earlier, showed a decrease Thursday.
For some, the brief water warning was a tipping point, a sign that the environment had become a threat. At the Tokyu grocery, an employee opened the store doors at 10 a.m. and a half-dozen pregnant women and young mothers rushed to the far aisle.
Within seven minutes, all 80 two-liter bottles were gone. Ochiai, cradling her daughter, held two of them. Her parents, who live in Hokkaido, a northern island, were sending 12 more bottles of water by airmail, she said.
“I actually feel sorry standing here with my two bottles of water,” Ochiai said. “All these other mothers are here now, and they are too late.”
As parents worried about supply, farmers brooded over the demand for their food, tainted by the government’s advisory that residents not eat 11 leafy vegetables grown in prefectures near the Daiichi facility, citing elevated levels of radioactive materials in them.
The advisory has left farmers nationwide wondering about the effect on their livelihood as consumers weigh the risks.
At a spinach farm in Chiba, about 11 / 2 hours outside Tokyo, the proprietor, Masayuki Kumate, 45, looked on as Sumito Hatta, a food researcher, used a dosimeter to take a radioactivity reading of a lone row of green plants sprouting from the dark brown soil.
Kumate shook his head. Although Chiba officials had not banned any produce, Kumate said he has “been worried since Day One” of the disaster.
“It’s so clear what was going to happen,” he said of the nuclear fallout. “For Fukushima farmers, it is impossible [to recover]. The soil is contaminated. They will have to get rid of that before they start again. It takes a very long time. It will be a very big problem.”
Hatta and a friend, Shinya Takeda, started a blog and a Facebook page dedicated to informing the Japanese people and the world about the plight facing Japan’s farmers and asking for donations.
Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries sent a letter to banks this week encouraging them to provide loans to farmers seeking to rebuild. And the government has pledged that the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the nuclear plant, will provide stipends to farmers whose crops have been contaminated.
“The farmlands that were soaked with saltwater will not be revived as farmland,” the Facebook page reads. “This reality is another destruction for the farmers. . . . Now people in Japan are buying up all food at supermarkets and oil at gas stations due to the anxiety. Our food sovereignty is in great danger.”
Special correspondents Akiko Yamamoto and Kyoko Tanaka contributed to this report.
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