The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reached a "highly critical" condition in the first two weeks after a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled its reactors, a key aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Saturday.
"We were in a very critical situation, where we had to consider several worst-case scenarios," premier Kan's special adviser Goshi Hosono said in a television program.
He said that the situation was today much more stable as plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501.TO) has managed to slowly bring down the temperatures at the reactors to safer levels.
"Compared with where we were, we have little by little gained control back over the nuclear plant. Now it's been more than a month, and the situation is much stabler," Mr. Hosono said.
The Atomic Energy Society of Japan released a report on its assessment on the Fukushima Daiichi reactors Friday, saying that the nuclear fuel has partially melted and that the molten part apparently has settled in granular form at the bottom of the pressure vessel.
It said this posed less of a threat than if the material had massed together but said that a long interruption of cooling for two or more days could create new serious risks. As major aftershocks continue to hit the region, there are concerns that power supplying the temporary pumps could again be disrupted.
Mr. Hosono said that one of the greatest issues at present is how to deal with the thousands of tons of radioactive water that has been used to cool the reactor cores and is now radioactive -- in some cases 100 million times the radioactivity normally found in a nuclear plant.
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official Hidehiko Nishiyama said setting up a system to purify contaminated cooling water is the key to a long-term solution to the crisis.
When the earthquake [...]
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