Nightmare without an end

Six years after disaster, Fukushima nuclear site still a toxic wasteland

TOKYO - When Hua Yi, a journalist from Xinhua, reached an area about five kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Thursday, his radiation detector would not stop vibrating and sounding alarms.

The machine indicated the radiation level was between 5 and 10 microsieverts per hour, which is more than 100 times that of Tokyo.

Invited by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc, Hua, along with other foreign journalists, paid a visit to the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

It was a sobering journey into what has essentially become a toxic wasteland - with no practical solution in sight.

As their car approached the power plant, the radiation level rose quickly.

At 24 km from the site, the reading was about 0.114 microsieverts per hour, twice the amount of Tokyo. At 15 km from the plant, the reading was 20 times higher.

Inside the power plant and close to one of the crippled reactors, the machine indicated the radiation level was as high as 150 microsieverts per hour.

Dozens of workers wearing protection suits were spotted working by the No 2 reactor, and according to a guide from Tepco, the radiation level there was as high as 1,000 microsieverts per hour.

Currently, some 6,000 staff are working in the Daiichi nuclear power plant.

In 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake triggered a massive tsunami that destroyed the emergency power and then the cooling system at the plant, forcing some 300,000 residents of Fukushima to evacuate.

The operator of the crippled plant said earlier this month levels of radiation as high as 650 sieverts per hour were detected inside the No 2 reactor, much to the consternation of Japan's nuclear watchdog and the international community.

That level is much higher than a reading of 73 sieverts per hour in 2012, and is enough to kill a person exposed for just a short period.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster ranked seven, the highest level on the international nuclear events scale, and was the most serious since the former Soviet Union's Chernobyl reactor meltdown in 1986.

Six years on, the crisis has yet to be fully brought under control, with no precise timeline for the full decommissioning of the plant, or a precise blueprint for the technological processes necessary for it to take place.

For Tepco, the difficult task of dealing with problems like processing contaminated water, cooling the reactors, and removing nuclear fuel continue to pose serious challenges.

Mysterious smoke at Niigata plant

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc on Thursday said it had detected smoke billowing from a service room near two reactors at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture, located on the west coast of Honshu island.

Tepco said there was no radiation leak as a result of the possible fire that occurred close to its reactors facing the Sea of Japan, although the utility has yet to comment on a possible cause.

The plant operator said it noticed smoke billowing out of a locker room inside the service building near its No 6 and No 7 reactors. It said the service building was not a radiation-controlled area.

The two reactors close to the possible fire which occurred at some point before 3:25 pm local time are currently being screened by Japan's nuclear regulation authority as Tepco is pushing for more of the plant's reactors to be brought back online.

However, Tepco, operator of the Daiichi plant in Fukushima that underwent multiple meltdowns after being hit by an earthquake-triggered tsunami in 2011, resulting in the worst commercial nuclear disaster in history that has yet to be fully brought under control, has been involved in a number of controversial incidents since the 2011 disaster.

Xinhua