Japan rushes against time to avert nuke meltdown

Reuters /Tokyo
Japanese military helicopters dumped water on an overheating nuclear plant yesterday while the US expressed growing alarm about leaking radiation and said it was sending aircraft to help Americans leave the country.
Engineers tried to run power from the main grid to fire up water pumps needed to cool two reactors and spent fuel rods considered to pose the biggest risk of spewing radioactivity into the atmosphere.
While Japanese officials scrambled with a patchwork of fixes, the top US nuclear regulator warned that the cooling pool for spent fuel rods at reactor No 4 may have run dry and another was leaking.
Gregory Jaczko, head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a parliamentary hearing that radiation levels around the cooling pool were extremely high, posing deadly risks for workers still toiling in the wreckage of the earthquake-shattered power plant.
"It would be very difficult for emergency workers to get near the reactors. The doses they could experience would potentially be lethal doses in a very short period of time,” he said in Washington.
The plant operator said it believed the No 4 reactor spent-fuel pool still had water as of Wednesday, and made clear its priority was the spent-fuel pool at the No 3 reactor. Yesterday morning alone, military helicopters dumped around 30 tonnes of water, all aimed at this reactor.
Inside the complex, torn apart by four explosions since a 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit last Friday, workers in protective suits and using makeshift lighting tried to monitor what was going on inside the six reactors. They have been working in short shifts to minimise radiation exposure.
US officials took pains not to criticise the Japanese government, which has shown signs of being overwhelmed by the crisis, but Washington’s actions indicated a divide with its close ally about the perilousness of the situation.
"The worst-case scenario doesn’t bear mentioning and the best-case scenario keeps getting worse,” Perpetual Investments said in a note on the crisis.
Japan said the US would fly a high-altitude drone over the stricken complex to gauge the situation, and had offered to send nuclear experts.
A state department official said flights would be laid on for Americans to leave, and family of embassy staff had been authorised to leave if they wanted.
Health experts said panic over radiation leaks from the Daiichi plant, around 240km north of Tokyo, was  diverting attention from other life-threatening risks facing survivors of last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, such as cold, heavy snow in parts and access to fresh water. 
The latest images from the nuclear plant showed severe damage to some of the buildings after the four explosions. Two of the buildings were a mangled mix of steel and concrete.
Sebastian Pflugbeil, president of the private German-based Society for Radiation Protection, said Japan’s efforts to pull the Fukushima plant back from the brink signalled "the beginning of the catastrophic phase”.
"Maybe we have to pray,” he said, adding that a wind blowing any nuclear fallout east into the Pacific would limit any damage for Japan’s 127mn people in case of a meltdown or other releases, for instance from spent fuel storage pools.
Low and harmless concentrations of radioactive particles were heading from Japan towards the United States, Lars-Erik De Geer, research director at the Swedish Defence Research Institute, a government agency, said, citing data from a network of international monitoring stations.
A stream of gloomy warnings and reports on the crisis from experts and officials around the world triggered a sharp fall in US financial markets, with all three major stock indexes slumping on fears of slower worldwide growth.
Earlier, one G7 central banker, who asked not to be named, said he was "extremely worried” about the wider effects of the crisis in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she does not expect the global economy to be hurt significantly by the catastrophe in Japan, adding also that Germany cannot get by totally without nuclear power in the short term.
G7 finance ministers will hold a conference call early today Japan time to discuss steps to help Tokyo cope with the financial and economic impact of the disaster, a source said.
Japanese Economics Minister Kaoru Yosano said the country’s markets were not unstable enough to warrant joint G7 currency intervention or government purchases of shares.
"I don’t think stock and currency markets are in a state of turmoil,” Yosano said.