Fukushima

Radioactive water continued to seep into the sea Monday after a failed attempt to seal the leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant using an absorbent polymer, sawdust and shredded paper. Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials think the leak has been coming from an 8-inch crack in the concrete pit holding power cables near reactor No. 2. On Monday, Tepco said it would use a dye to try to trace the path of the leak, Kyodo News reported. Radiation levels in the pit water are an estimated 1,000 millisieverts per hour, a high but not immediately lethal dose.

As far as I could tell from the advertising at the hotel where I stayed in Kiev last year, Ukraine's chief export these days is brides. But it wasn't always that way. Twenty-five years ago this month, Ukraine's best-known export was a whole lot of radiation. After Reactor No. 4 blew up at Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986, the resulting disaster took two years and 650,000 people to clean up. Except it will never really be cleaned up. Nuclear fallout and waste can be moved and sequestered, but not deactivated.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Saturday visited tsunami survivors and workers trying to bring the Fukushima nuclear facility under control as the plant's operator said highly radioactive water was leaking from a pit near a reactor into the ocean. Kan was briefed by city officials in the northern city of Rikuzentakata and later met with 250 disaster victims at a school. "I promise that the government will fully assist survivors to regain a normal life," Kan, dressed in a blue workman's-style jacket and pants, told reporters at the school.

Radiation levels increased sharply inside and outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Thursday, slowing work on the devastated facility again and once more throwing into doubt the integrity of the containment vessels that hold the fuel rods. Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials said the level of radioactive iodine in water at the plant hit levels 10,000 times the permissible limit, preventing workers from getting near the water, which accumulated during early efforts to prevent a full-fledged meltdown by flooding the plant.

Since the nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima in Japan, the stock of the company that designed the reactors, General Electric, has fluctuated less than $1 a share. Meanwhile, the operator of the facility, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has seen its share price plunge more than 70%. The explanation: Japanese law reportedly limits liability to the operator, not the designer, of a nuclear power plant. A year ago, we heard similar arguments about the limited exposure of BP in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hoshi Jyunichu lives in a nuclear ghost town. On a recent afternoon, he calmly swept the entrance to his downtown coffeehouse, even though only one solitary soul had crossed the threshold the entire day. His customers, his neighbors, even his family, have all fled, leaving the 46-year-old father of two among Minamisoma's stubborn holdouts. "I was born here; I don't want to give up this town," he insisted. "And so I'm staying until I can bring my family back here. " Yet no one in Minamisoma, or anywhere else, has the faintest idea when that might possibly happen.

The nuclear crisis in Japan is far from over. In recent days, highly radioactive water has been discovered in tunnels under reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and radioactive plutonium has been found in the soil nearby. Efforts to contain the leaking radioactive material are underway, and cleanup will take far longer. Here are answers to some basic questions. How did plutonium get into the soil? In two samples, tests suggest that the plutonium came from the Fukushima reactors.

The chairman of the utility that runs the crippled Fukushima power plant on Wednesday said the facility's four tsunami-battered reactors would have to be scrapped, and he apologized to the Japanese public for the nuclear disaster. Tsunehisa Katsumata, chairman of the Tokyo Electric Power Co., expressed his deep remorse for the accident at Fukushima in northern Japan, including explosions, the release of radiation and contamination of crops and tap water. Although Katsumata referred only to scrapping reactors No. 1 through 4, government officials and other experts have been saying for more than a week that the entire complex, including the less problematic reactors 5 and 6, eventually would have to be decommissioned.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan for the first time criticized Tepco, which owns the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, for inadequate preparations for a tsunami at the facility. The sea wall at the plant was designed to withstand an 18-foot wave, while the actual tsunami that struck after the magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake was estimated to be more than 40 feet high. "It's undeniable their assumptions about tsunamis were greatly mistaken," Kan said Tuesday of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. in an address to the Japanese parliament.

They sleep with just one blanket apiece anywhere there's space — in a conference room, in the hallway, near the bathroom. Because deliveries of supplies are limited, they get by on very little food: Breakfast is packages of high-calorie emergency crackers and a small carton of vegetable juice; dinner consists of a small bag of "magic rice" (just add bottled water) and a can of chicken, mackerel or curry. There is no lunch — handing out a noontime meal would be too complicated in the crowded two-story building.