FUKUSHIMA, Japan — Officials raced Monday to restore electricity to Japan’s leaking nuclear plant, where mangled machinery and partly melted reactor cores make bringing the complex under control a monstrous job.
Efforts to stabilize the plant stalled Monday when engineers found crucial machinery at one reactor required repair that will take two to three days, government officials said.
Workers trying to repair another reactor, No. 3, were evacuated in the afternoon after gray smoke rose from it, said Tetsuro Fukuyama, the deputy chief cabinet secretary of the Japanese government. But no explosion was heard and the smoke ended by 6 p.m., NHK, the national broadcaster, said.
Fukuyama said significantly higher radiation had not been detected around the reactors.
An official at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that Reactors No. 1 and No. 2 were too damaged for cooling systems to restart immediately, even when electricity is restored. But the official, William Borchardt, also said the situation appeared to be “on the verge of stabilizing.”
Restoring the power to all six units at the complex will, in theory, power up the maze of motors, valves and switches that help deliver cooling water to the overheated reactor cores and spent fuel pools that are leaking radiation.
Ideally, officials believe it should only take a day to get the nuclear plant under control once the cooling system is up and running. In reality, the effort could take weeks.
Late Monday night, the deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, suggested why there is so much uncertainty.
“We have experienced a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected,” Hidehiko Nishiyama said.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it had placed emergency orders for new pumps, but it was unclear how long it would take for them to arrive.
If officials can get the power turned on, get replacement pumps working and get enough seawater into the reactors and spent fuel pools, it would only take a day to bring the temperatures to a safe, cooling stage, said Ryohei Shiomi, another NISA official.
And if not?
“There is nothing else we can do but keep doing what we’ve been doing,” Shiomi said. Officials would continue dousing the plant in seawater — and hope for the best.
Associated Pressand New York Times
