Reactor Pressure Under Control
The New York Times reports:
TOKYO — As Japan struggled to contain the damage at its crippled nuclear complex on Sunday, two people were reported to have been found alive, nine days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.
An 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson were found under the debris of their home in Ishinomaki City, about 30 miles northeast of the city of Sendai, according to Miyagi Prefecture police officials and the public broadcaster NHK.
The youth, identified as Jin Abe, crawled out of the debris of the family home and was found by local police, who called rescuers to free his grandmother, Sumi Abe, NHK reported. Both were hospitalized but details of their condition were not immediately available.
Their rescue came as work continued at the nuclear plant. Earlier Sunday, officials announced — but then quickly scrapped — plans to release more radioactive gases into the air to relieve pressure at its most troubled reactor.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japan Self-Defense Forces focused their efforts on Reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima plant, some 170 miles north of Tokyo, which contains a highly toxic fuel that includes reclaimed plutonium.
Attempts to cool the reactor — broadcast on television nonstop as firefighters doused it with 2,400 tons of water over 14 hours — appeared to initially suffer a serious setback as officials at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that pressure buildup would require the venting of gases.
But at a news conference a few hours later, officials from the power company said that the pressure had stabilized and they had canceled the release of gases, which would have heightened worries about a wider contamination among the population. They said that spraying seawater into the reactor may have initially caused the pressure to rise.
Those fears reached Tokyo a day earlier with the announcement by the government that it had found higher than normal levels of radioactivity in spinach and milk at farms about 90 miles away from the power plant, the first confirmation that the unfolding nuclear crisis has affected the nation’s food supply.
The government said it would announce on Monday whether to restrict the sale of foodstuffs from that region.
The government said Sunday that the power company and the Self-Defense Forces were making progress in their efforts to get the troubled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station under control.
“In general, our utmost efforts are producing definite results in preventing a worsening of the situation,” said Yukio Edano, the government’s chief cabinet secretary. Mr. Edano also confirmed for the first time that the nuclear complex — already inoperable because of the use of seawater to cool its overheating reactors — would be closed once the crisis is over.
