Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata will take charge of the troubled utility while the president recovers.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Katsumata apologized “deeply” to the public for the destruction of the plant and the “release of radioactive substances” and expressed his condolence to victims of the earthquake.
Cool water powered by diesel generators or firetruck pumps continued to circulate around nuclear fuel rods in reactors at the plant on Tuesday, limiting the potential for further releases of toxic particles.
Crews piled sandbags and concrete blocks around the mouths of flooded tunnels to keep contaminated water from spilling out into the sea and slowly pumped stagnant radioactive water out of dark turbine rooms.
At the same time, scientists — under orders from nuclear regulators — painstakingly increased their documentation of the damage that explosions from the malfunctioning reactors and probable leaks from one or more reactor cores have begun to inflict on the country’s food and water supplies and its environment.
“Monitor,” “measure,” “follow” and “study” have become the mantras of government officials who have only the earliest glimpses of how the disaster will evolve.
At a meeting of the Japanese parliament, Prime Minister Naoto Kan criticized plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. for failing to adequately protect the facility from disaster. The plant was flooded by a wave that easily swept over its 20-foot-high protective wall.
“It’s undeniable,” Kan said in language unusually harsh by Japanese standards, that Tepco’s “assumptions about tsunamis were greatly mistaken.”
When asked at a news conference whether contaminated water on the site was continuing to spread, Hidehiko Nishiyama, director general for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said he had no data to show that it was.
But Tepco should “strengthen surveillance and monitoring,” Nishiyama said. The same goes for tracking the extent of plutonium already found in five soil samples taken on plant grounds or the path of radioactive iodine that’s been traced in the ocean.
The highly contaminated water was first discovered outside the reactor in giant turbine rooms last week; three men suffered radiation burns while working in one of the rooms. And on Monday, the utility reported that underground tunnels outside the building were filled with water.
Radiation doses in both buildings near the second reactor measured in excess of 1,000 millisieverts per hour, potent enough to cause serious illness after several hours of exposure. The limit on workers there is 250 millisieverts of radiation per year, which they would reach in 15 minutes at the most radioactive sites in the facility.
Loading...
Comments