Fukushima 50 and other news

California: Fukushima radiation found in kelp

April 10 (UPI) — Radiation from Fukushima, Japan, following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami has been detected in giant kelp along the California coast, researchers say.

A recent report in the journal Environmental Science & Technology said marine biologists at Cal State Long Beach found radioactive iodine in samples collected from beds of kelp along the coast from Laguna Beach to as far north as Santa Cruz about a month after the explosion and meltdown of the Fukushima reactors.

While probably not a threat to humans, the levels were significantly higher than measurements taken before the disaster explosion and comparable to those found in British Columbia, Canada, and northern Washington State following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

Giant kelp is a good indicator of radioactive material in the environment because it takes up iodine, the scientists said.

“Radioactivity is taken up by the kelp and anything that feeds on the kelp will be exposed to this also,” Steven Manley, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

Some species of fish may be particularly affected because their endocrine systems contain iodine, researchers said.

“It enters the coastal food web and gets dispersed over a variety of organisms. … It’s not a good thing, but whether it actually has a measurable detrimental effect is beyond my expertise.”

Read more: http://www.upi.com

Flying drone provides new views Japan’s damaged reactors

Tokyo (CNN) — Engineers used a flying drone to peer into the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Sunday as the crisis spurred more than 2,000 people to march against nuclear energy in Tokyo.

“I was just a couch potato critic, but here we are today with friends for the first time, and I’m sure it’s the first time for a lot of people today,” said Karima Asuma Stickan, one of the protesters.

Monday marks a full month in the battle to prevent a worse disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, which was battered by the earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11. Japan’s largest utility, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, has been struggling to cool down three damaged reactors and prevent a wider release of radioactivity than has already occurred.

A camera was mounted on a remote-controlled helicopter to get pictures of the damaged reactors from above Sunday in hopes of getting a better look at the damaged housings of the No. 1, 3 and 4 reactors and hopefully the pools of spent fuel inside, company spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said. The drone hovered over the plant for 28 minutes at an altitude of about 150 meters (492 feet), he said.

The T-Hawk drone, built by the U.S. company Honeywell, can transmit ordinary pictures as well as infrared images, Matsumoto told reporters. Images captured by the drone are expected to be released Monday, he said.

In addition, the company is now using remote-controlled heavy machinery to clear away debris outside the plant and has begun the process of laying new pipes to start pumping radioactive water out of the flooded basements of the turbine plants behind units 1 through 3.

48-foot wave hits nuclear plant

Journalist enters radiation zone

Radiation fears slow Japan’s economy

Japan catastrophe: CNN photo story RELATED TOPICS
2011 Japan Disaster
Nuclear Energy
Fukushima Daiichi
One worker fell ill during the work Sunday, the company said, but said there was no indication that radiation was the cause. The worker, who is in his 30s, was wearing protective gear, Tokyo Electric said, but officials did not know how long he had been working before getting sick. He was taken to a hospital.

Workers have been pouring hundreds of tons of fresh water a day into the three damaged reactors and the spent fuel pools of units 1-4 to keep them cool until normal circulation systems can be restored. The No. 2 reactor is believed to be leaking highly radioactive water, some of which had been spilling into the Pacific until Wednesday, while flooded basements in the turbine plants of all three units are making it impossible to restore power, company officials say.

To make room for the fluid, Tokyo Electric has been dumping less-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean from a waste treatment facility on the site. That process — which also includes the release of radioactive water from the drainage basins beneath reactors 5 and 6 — was nearly complete Sunday evening, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency reported.

The radioactive particles in the water are dispersing into the ocean. But concentrations of radioactive iodine-131 remained 25 times higher than the Japanese legal standard in water sampled 16 km (10 miles) south of the plant on Saturday.

That’s down from 93 times the limit on Wednesday, according to sampling data released Sunday. Levels of longer-lived cesium-137, which takes 30 years to lose half its radioactivity, remained nearly six times the legal limit but well below levels reported earlier this week.

The discharge was billed as an emergency measure, but it infuriated Japan’s fishing industry and drew protests from neighboring South Korea. And participants in Sunday’s protest in Shiba Park, at the foot of the landmark Tokyo Tower, expressed concern about the long-term effects of the radioactive releases so far.

“The air pollution gets into the lungs,” said Dr. Nobuhiko Murapsu, a pulmonary care physician from Chiba Prefecture, north of Tokyo. “Five years, 10, 20 years later, they get lung cancer. This is a very severe problem.”

Murapsu said he’s changed his views on nuclear power since the accident and decided to join the demonstration. Protesters marched from the park, ringed with cherry blossoms, to Tokyo Electric’s headquarters and on to the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry, which regulates Japanese nuclear power plants.

Makiko Mikami told CNN that no one believes they’re getting enough answers from either the utility or the government.

“The problem is, I think I’m not sure they know the whole picture themselves,” Mikami said. “If they know, they should share that information with us. And if they don’t, they should admit that they’re scared as well.”

Fukushima worker refuses to reveal own radiation exposure level

(Tokyo-ANI)  A Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) employee has refused to reveal the amount of radiation he has been exposed to while dealing with Japan’s nuclear crisis inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex.

“I can’t tell you. It’s private information“
Kyodo News quoted Yasuki Murata, a 44-year-old TEPCO worker from the planning and public relations section for the plant, as saying.

Murata has been staying inside a two-story anti-seismic building on the plant’s premises since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant, causing it to release radioactive materials into the environment. He only goes out when food from a soccer training facility arrives.

Murata said he was recently allowed to take a day off after five successive days of work, and visited his wife and their son, an elementary school third-grader.His wife and son are living at his parents’ house in Tokyo.

So far around 21 workers at the plant have been exposed to radiation exceeding 100 millisieverts, the usual limit for exposure in an emergency, even as the radiation limit for the current crisis has been raised to 250 millisieverts.

A prefabricated facility has been set up at the entrance of the operation base for the workers to take off protective suits.

Around 20 to 30 workers remove their protective suits at a time, every evening before moving on to the building’s entrance in their underwear and removing remaining radioactive substances from their faces and bodies prior to going inside, Murata said.

Radiation levels as high as around 3000 microsieverts per hour were detected at one point around the building some 200 meters northwest of the No.1 reactor, whose fuel rods are estimated to have been 70 percent damaged, the worst among the three seriously affected reactors.

Update: Another earthquake rocks Japan-Tsunami warning issued

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake just hit NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN (Earthquake details below from the USGS.gov site) . A tsunami alert was issued for the coastal towns. This is the same region that was already devastated by the earlier earthquake and aftershock. A person who witnessed this earthquake stated that this was “very different from the aftershocks, stronger and lasted longer, almost a minute in all”. The tsunami alert should end soon and details of the impact will be shared as soon as I get them.

UPDATE: TEPCO has released information regarding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. They said that everything was ok at the already stricken nuclear plant. They indicated that no further damage had been done but they were continuing checks.

U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant

NY Times , JAMES GLANZ and WILLIAM J. BROAD – United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semimolten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.

In recent days, workers have grappled with several side effects of the emergency measures taken to keep nuclear fuel at the plant from overheating, including leaks of radioactive water at the site and radiation burns to workers who step into the water. The assessment, as well as interviews with officials familiar with it, points to a new panoply of complex challenges that water creates for the safety of workers and the recovery and long-term stability of the reactors.

While the assessment does not speculate on the likelihood of new explosions or damage from an aftershock, either could lead to a breach of the containment structures in one or more of the crippled reactors, the last barriers that prevent a much more serious release of radiation from the nuclear core. If the fuel continues to heat and melt because of ineffective cooling, some nuclear experts say, that could also leave a radioactive mass that could stay molten for an extended period.

The document, which was obtained by The New York Times, provides a more detailed technical assessment than Japanese officials have provided of the conundrum facing the Japanese as they struggle to prevent more fuel from melting at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But it appears to rely largely on data shared with American experts by the Japanese.

Among other problems, the document raises new questions about whether pouring water on nuclear fuel in the absence of functioning cooling systems can be sustained indefinitely. Experts have said the Japanese need to continue to keep the fuel cool for many months until the plant can be stabilized, but there is growing awareness that the risks of pumping water on the fuel present a whole new category of challenges that the nuclear industry is only beginning to comprehend.

The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to one mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed.

David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who worked on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan and now directs the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the welter of problems revealed in the document at three separate reactors made a successful outcome even more uncertain.

“I thought they were, not out of the woods, but at least at the edge of the woods,” said Mr. Lochbaum, who was not involved in preparing the document. “This paints a very different picture, and suggests that things are a lot worse. They could still have more damage in a big way if some of these things don’t work out for them.”

The steps recommended by the nuclear commission include injecting nitrogen, an inert gas, into the containment structures in an attempt to purge them of hydrogen and oxygen, which could combine to produce explosions. The document also recommends that engineers continue adding boron to cooling water to help prevent the cores from restarting the nuclear reaction, a process known as criticality.

Even so, the engineers who prepared the document do not believe that a resumption of criticality is an immediate likelihood, Neil Wilmshurst, vice president of the nuclear sector at the Electric Power Research Institute, said when contacted about the document. “I have seen no data to suggest that there is criticality ongoing,” said Mr. Wilmshurst, who was involved in the assessment.

The document was prepared for the commission’s Reactor Safety Team, which is assisting the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant. It says it is based on the “most recent available data” from numerous Japanese and American organizations, including the electric power company, the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, the United States Department of Energy, General Electric and the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent, nonprofit group.

The document contains detailed assessments of each of the plant’s six reactors along with recommendations for action. Nuclear experts familiar with the assessment said that it was regularly updated but that over all, the March 26 version closely reflected current thinking.The assessment provides graphic new detail on the conditions of the damaged cores in reactors 1, 2 and 3. Because slumping fuel and salt from seawater that had been used as a coolant is probably blocking circulation pathways, the water flow in No. 1 “is severely restricted and likely blocked.” Inside the core itself, “there is likely no water level,” the assessment says, adding that as a result, “it is difficult to determine how much cooling is getting to the fuel.” Similar problems exist in No. 2 and No. 3, although the blockage is probably less severe, the assessment says.

Some of the salt may have been washed away in the past week with the switch from seawater to fresh water cooling, nuclear experts said.

A rise in the water level of the containment structures has often been depicted as a possible way to immerse and cool the fuel. The assessment, however, warns that “when flooding containment, consider the implications of water weight on seismic capability of containment.”

Experts in nuclear plant design say that this warning refers to the enormous stress put on the containment structures by the rising water. The more water in the structures, the more easily a large aftershock could rupture one of them.

Margaret Harding, a former reactor designer for General Electric, warned of aftershocks and said, “If I were in the Japanese’s shoes, I’d be very reluctant to have tons and tons of water sitting in a containment whose structural integrity hasn’t been checked since the earthquake.”

The N.R.C. document also expressed concern about the potential for a “hazardous atmosphere” in the concrete-and-steel containment structures because of the release of hydrogen and oxygen from the seawater in a highly radioactive environment.

Hydrogen explosions in the first few days of the disaster heavily damaged several reactor buildings and in one case may have damaged a containment structure. That hydrogen was produced by a mechanism involving the metal cladding of the nuclear fuel. The document urged that Japanese operators restore the ability to purge the structures of these gases and fill them with stable nitrogen gas, a capability lost after the quake and tsunami.

Nuclear experts say that radiation from the core of a reactor can split water molecules in two, releasing hydrogen. Mr. Wilmshurst said that since the March 26 document, engineers had calculated that the amount of hydrogen produced would be small. But Jay A. LaVerne, a physicist at Notre Dame, said that at least near the fuel rods, some hydrogen would in fact be produced, and could react with oxygen. “If so,” Mr. LaVerne said in an interview, “you have an explosive mixture being formed near the fuel rods.”

Nuclear engineers have warned in recent days that the pools outside the containment buildings that hold spent fuel rods could pose an even greater danger than the melted reactor cores. The pools, which sit atop the reactor buildings and are meant to keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems.

The N.R.C. report suggests that the fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor suffered a hydrogen explosion early in the Japanese crisis and could have shed much radioactive material into the environment, what it calls “a major source term release.”

Experts worry about the fuel pools because explosions have torn away their roofs and exposed their radioactive contents. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.

“Even the best juggler in the world can get too many balls up in the air,” Mr. Lochbaum said of the multiplicity of problems at the plant. “They’ve got a lot of nasty things to negotiate in the future, and one missed step could make the situation much, much worse.”

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Fukushima worker discusses choice to sacrifice his life

Brett Michael Dykes – As Japan continues to grapple with catastrophic radiation leaks at the quake-damaged Fukushima Daichii nuclear complex, the plant’s remaining workers have shown heroic dedication in the face of a task that amounts to a likely suicide mission.

The global audience following the Japanese nuclear drama has learned a little about these selfless heroes. But some of the most basic questions about them–who they are and what has motivated them to make the ultimate sacrifice–have gone unanswered. Now, however, the Agence France Press reporter Kimi De Freytas has published an interview with one of the Fukushima workers that sheds considerable light on how they understand their mission–and how they are holding up under under the extraordinary, mortal stress they are facing.

Hiroyuki Kohno, a 44-year-old plant worker who’s been employed in the nuclear industry since he was a teenager, promptly answered the emergency call issued by his employer, a subcontractor for the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Shortly after last March’s devastating earthquake and tsunami produced a power outage at the facility, Kohno’s employers sent out an all-hands appeal via email.

“Attention. We would like you to come work at the plant. Can you?” De Freytas reports the email read. Kohno, who has worked at the Fukushima facility for the past decade, said he knew what the implications of heeding the call would be.

“To be honest, no one wants to go,” Kohno told De Freytas. “Radiation levels at the plant are unbelievably high compared with normal conditions. I know that when I go this time, I will return with a body no longer capable of work at a nuclear plant.”

Kohno told De Freytas that as a single man with no children, he felt obligated to answer the call and join the team that the media has dubbed the “Fukushima Fifty.” Better that he face the risk, he explained, so as to spare his colleagues who have dependents counting on them. Besides, he added, the workers in the plant are his brothers and sisters, and he feels an allegiance to them.

“There’s a Japanese expression: ‘We eat from the same bowl.’ These are friends I shared pain and laughter with. That’s why I’m going,” he explained to De Freytas.

Other workers among the Fukushima Fifty have apparently discussed the dire prospects ahead fairly openly. As the unidentified mother of a 32-year-old plant worker explained in a tearful phone interview with Fox News, “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.” Meanwhile, plant officials have sought to supplement the ranks of workers seeking to contain the spread of radioactive contamination from the facility with workers known as “jumpers”—contract employees who agree to complete designated tasks before fleeing in the hopes that they can shun sustained radioactive exposure. Workers in the “jumper” corps are being offered as much as $5,000 a day, Reuters reports—and many are still turning the offers down.

While the fate of Kohno and his fellow workers remains uncertain, their fellow citizens are already determined to commemorate their heroism.

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Radiation rumours rattle Japanese exports

AllAboutFeed.net  -  With the radiation problems of the Fukushima plants in Japan still not being solved, more countries start worrying about products that are imported from this country.

Canada has tightened its controls on Japanese imports to include all food and animal feed products from areas affected by Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said that it requires documentation proving the safety of food and feed products before it will allow them into Canada.

The federal agency has also begun testing radiation levels of Japanese products, it said.

Precautionary measures
Other countries also have imposed restrictions, and Russia’s food safety body said on Friday it may ban seafood from areas near the Fukushima nuclear plant.

As a precautionary measure the Dutch Food Inspection Agency will check all products on radiation that enter the Netherlands from Japan.

In the EU since 1989 maximum levels of radiation in food and feed has been put into legislation through the Euratom regulation 2218/89. An overview of the limits can be found here.

The European Commission obliges member states to control imports from Japan. EU-countries have to random sample and control food and feed (ingredients).

Too high levels
Above-safety radiation levels have been discovered in some types of vegetables from the Fukushima area in northeast Japan, where a six-reactor nuclear plant was battered by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese government has said.

Japan has stopped shipments of vegetables and milk from near the plant.

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Japanese playgrounds to be tested for radiation

Julian Ryall, Tokyo – Radiation measuring equipment is being installed at the 1,400 nurseries, primary and junior high schools in the prefecture, according to the local government, in an attempt to allay parents’ fears.

Japanese Officials have repeated that there is no threat to human health for anyone outside the 18-mile exclusion imposed around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was seriously damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Parents who have expressed concern over the radiation that continues to leak from the plant will not have been reassured, however, by the admission on Tuesday by Tokyo Electric Power Co. that levels of radioactive iodine-131 in seawater off the plant’s damaged No. 2 reactor are 7.5 million times higher than normal.

Tepco has been unable to stem leaks of highly radioactive water from the facility. Efforts to date have included pouring concrete into a cracked maintenance pit before turning to a polymer used in nappies mixed with sawdust and shredded newspaper.

Neither method has proved effective and Tepco engineers are still trying to identify the exact source of the leak.

The company continued to pump water with low levels of radiation out of the basements of the reactor buildings and subterranean trenches on Tuesday. The decision to dump the water into the Pacific has increased concern among local fishermen and neighbouring countries.

Banri Kaieda, the industry minister, apologised on Tuesday for being forced to pump the water into the ocean but maintained that the radiation will be quickly dispersed by the currents and poses no risk to human health.

Earlier in the day, the fisheries minister announced that the government would make inspections of marine produce more stringent and more frequent in waters off the eastern coast of Japan. The government also imposed a legal limit for radioactive iodine in fish.

Tepco officials announced on Tuesday that it will start drawing up estimates for compensation for people who lived or had farms or businesses close to the plant. More than 80,000 people have been forced to leave their homes and the government has admitted that it may be many years before they can return.

Tepco will reimburse them for any medical expenses, lost income and will cover their living costs, with the first payments of Y20 million (£146,200) to be distributed among the residents of nine villages nearest to the plant.

The latest casualty figures from the March 11 disasters show that 12,321 people were killed while a further 15,347 remain missing.

Japan’s ocean radioactivity hits 7.5 million times legal limit

Tokyo— The operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1 million times the legal limit.

The exact source of the radiation was not immediately clear, though Tepco has said that highly contaminated water has been leaking from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. The utility initially believed that the leak was coming from a crack, but several attempts to seal the crack failed.

On Tuesday the company said the leak instead might be coming from a faulty joint where the pit meets a duct, allowing radioactive water to seep into a layer of gravel underneath. The utility said it would inject “liquid glass” into gravel in an effort to stop further leakage.

Meanwhile, Tepco continued releasing what it described as water contaminated with low levels of radiation into the sea to make room in on-site storage tanks for more highly contaminated water. In all, the company said it planned to release 11,500 tons of the water, but by Tuesday morning it had released less than 25% of that amount.

Although the government authorized the release of the 11,500 tons and has said that any radiation would be quickly diluted and dispersed in the ocean, fish with high readings of iodine are being found.

On Monday, officials detected more than 4,000 bequerels of iodine-131 per kilogram in a type of fish called a sand lance caught less than three miles offshore of the town of Kita-Ibaraki. The young fish also contained 447 bequerels of cesium-137, which is considered more problematic than iodine-131 because it has a much longer half-life.

On Tuesday chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said the government was imposing a standard of 2,000 bequerels of iodine per kilogram of fish, the same level it allows in vegetables. Previously, the government did not have a specific level for fish. Another haul of sand lance with 526 bequerels of cesium was detected Tuesday, in excess of the standard of 500 bequerels per kilogram.

Fishing of sand lances has been suspended. Local fishermen called on Tepco to halt the release of radioactive water into the sea and demanded that the company compensate them for their losses.

Fishing has been banned near the plant, and the vast majority of fishing activity in the region has been halted because of damage to boats and ports by the March 11 tsunami and earthquake. Still, some fishermen are out making catches, only to find few buyers because of fears about radiation.

It was unclear what Tepco might offer the fishermen, but the company did say Tuesday that it had offered “condolence payments” totaling 180 million yen ($2 million) to local residents who had to evacuate their homes because of radiation from the Fukushima plant. One town, however, refused the payment.

The company has yet to decide how it will compensate residents near the plant for damages, though financial analysts say the claims could be in the tens of billions of dollars. Tepco’s executive vice president Takashi Fujimoto said the company’s decision on damages hinges on how much of the burden the government will share.

Edano urged the company to accelerate its decisions on compensation.

For now the company has offered to give 20 million yen ($240,000) to each of 10 villages, towns and cities within 12 miles of the plant, Fujimoto said.

“We hope they will find it of some use for now,” he said.

Namie, a town of 20,600 located about 6 miles north of the plant, refused to take the money. Town official Kosei Negishi said that he and other government officials were working out of a makeshift office in Nihonmatsu city, elsewhere in Fukushima prefecture, and that they faced more pressing issues.

“The coastal areas of Namie were hit hard by the earthquake and the tsunami but because of the radiation and the evacuation order we haven’t had a chance to conduct a search for the 200 people who are missing,” said Negishi. “Why would we use our resources to hand out less than 1,000 yen ($12) to every resident?”

Tokyo Electric Power’s Fujimoto acknowledged that there was a “gap” in the views of company and Namie officials.

Tepco’s shares dropped to an all-time low Tuesday, falling by the maximum daily trading limit — about 18% — to 362 yen, below the previous record low of 393 yen reached in December 1951. The company’s share price has lost 80% of its value — nearly 1.1 trillion yen — since the quake and tsunami, according to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

“We take the stock price decline very seriously,” Fujimoto told reporters.

Fujimoto said the company’s annual earnings report, which was originally scheduled for April 28, would be postponed, but he declined to give any other details.

by julie.makinen@latimes.com

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Radioactive Iodine and Cesium found leaking into the ocean-TEPCO press release

Today at around 9:30 am, we detected water containing radiation dose over 1,000 mSv/h in the pit(concrete shaft) where supply cables are stored near the intake channel of Unit 2. Furthermore, there was a crack about 20 cm on the concrete lateral of the pit, from where the water in the pit was out flowing. At around 12:20 pm, we reaffirmed the event at the scene. We have implemented sampling of the water in the pit, together with the seawater in front of the bar screen near the pit. These samples were sent to Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Station for analysis. (We already informed on April 2nd, 2011)

Afterward, we implemented sea water sampling at the inside of the pit and in front of the bar screen near the pit. We made radionuclide analysis and found radioactive materials (For details to Appendix). Therefore, we reported to Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and Fukushima prefecture respectively.

We considered announcing 3 type of nucleus (iodine- 131, cesium-131, and cesium-137) as definite value at the result of the analysis. In addition, we will re-evaluate other type of nucleus based on the preventive measures under a strong warning of NISA on April 1st,

We will implement the countermeasure continuously in order to prevent radioactive materials influx to the sea from near the pit.