Workers enter another reactor building at crippled Fukushima plant

TOKYO, May 18 Kyodo - Workers trying to restore the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Wednesday entered the building housing the troubled No. 2 reactor for the first time since an explosion occurred inside the building in the early days of the nuclear crisis.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. has already sent people inside the No. 1 reactor building to make preparations to create a system to stably cool the nuclear fuel, and similar work is expected to take place inside the No. 2 reactor, such as checking the equipment and adjusting the reactor's gauges that may have some malfunctions.
The utility known as TEPCO is struggling to contain the nuclear crisis, triggered in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, in line with a road map that aims to bring the crippled Nos. 1 to 3 reactors to a stable cooling condition by mid-July and to a condition called ''cold shutdown'' by January at the latest.
In an updated version of its road map unveiled Tuesday, TEPCO did not change the broad restoration time frame, but said it plans to create a system to cool the three reactors by recycling massive amounts of radioactive water now filling up the reactor buildings and the adjacent reactor turbine buildings.
The water would be recycled by using a decontamination facility, scheduled to be set up in mid-June. TEPCO said it now estimates that roughly 84,700 tons of relatively highly radioactive water are in the Nos. 1 to 4 reactor buildings, reactor turbine buildings and nearby underground trenches.
The pools of water are believed to be a side effect of an emergency measure after the disaster to keep injecting water into the reactors and spent fuel pools, which lost their key cooling functions in the quake and tsunami, to prevent the fuel inside from overheating.
The latest findings have suggested that the No. 1 reactor core suffered a meltdown shortly after the plant was rattled by the earthquake, and government officials have emphasized the need to act on the assumption that the Nos. 2 and 3 reactor cores may also be in a similar situation.
On Wednesday morning, four TEPCO workers entered the No. 2 reactor building for about 15 minutes. They were exposed to radiation of between 3.33 and 4.27 millisieverts, TEPCO said.
The environment inside the No. 2 reactor building is tough for workers not only because of the high radiation level but also the high humidity that can be attributed to steam coming out from the pool that stores the spent nuclear fuel, it said.
TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto told a press conference in the afternoon that the company plans to install a device to efficiently cool the water inside the spent fuel pool and start the system's test-run May 31.
The system is also expected to help lower the humidity inside the building, which would mean an improvement in the working conditions there, according to the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
TEPCO will speak on Thursday about the outcome of the radiation level and other data obtained from the entry into the No. 2 reactor building, Matsumoto said.
Meanwhile, Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda told a separate press conference that he thinks the direct cause of the crisis was the giant tsunami that led the plant to lose all its power sources, rather than the quake, denying speculation that key reactor equipment may have suffered damage before the power loss occurred.
Such speculation has emerged after it was found that the radiation level inside the No. 1 reactor building was already high on the night of March 11.