Spent Fuel Hampers Efforts at Japanese Nuclear Plant (& damaged central command center)

[jpak]

Workers at Japan’s ravaged nuclear power plant on Tuesday renewed a bid to bring its command center back online and restore electricity to vital cooling systems but an overheating spent fuel pool hampered efforts and raised the threat of further radiation leaks.

The storage pool at Fukushima Daiichi Power Station’s No. 2 Reactor, which holds spent nuclear fuel rods, was spewing steam late Tuesday, forcing workers to divert their attention to dousing the reactor building with water. If unchecked the water in the pool could boil away, exposing the fuel rods and releasing large amounts of radiation into the air.“We cannot leave this alone and we must take care of it as quickly as possible,” Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told reporters. Cooling systems at all of the plant’s six reactors were knocked out by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and power has since been restored to two reactors, units 5 and 6.

Workers continued efforts Tuesday on a power line to service the other four reactors though some of the machinery, including the water pumps that cool the reactors, may be damaged, officials said. That could mean more repair work before the four reactors can be connected to a power supply.

Another major effort: to restore full power and resume operations at the plant’s central command center, which will make it easier for workers to monitor heat and water levels at the reactors. Recovery efforts have been hindered by difficulties in gauging readings of crucial data, forcing officials to work off aerial photos and speculation. Workers continued pumping water into three reactors using fire hoses to keep them from overheating, while firefighters aimed streams of water at their spent fuel pools through gaps in the buildings housing the reactors, blown out in a series of explosions that rocked the site last week.

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