TOKYO/SENDAI – Highly radioactive water has leaked from a reactor at Japan’s crippled nuclear complex, the plant’s operator said on Monday, while environmental group Greenpeace said it had detected high levels of radiation outside an exclusion zone. Reflecting growing unease about efforts to control the six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi complex, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) had appealed to French companies for help, the Kyodo news agency said. The plant, 240 km north of Tokyo, was damaged in a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 27,000 people dead or missing across northeast Japan.
Fires, explosions and radiation leaks have repeatedly forced engineers to suspend efforts to stabilise the plant, including on Sunday when radiation levels spiked to 100,000 times above normal in water inside reactor No 2. A partial meltdown of fuel rods inside the reactor vessel was responsible for the high levels of radiation, although Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the radiation had mainly been contained in the reactor building. TEPCO later said radiation above 1,000 millisieverts per hour was found in water in underground concrete tunnels that extend beyond the reactor. That is the same as the level discovered on Sunday.
The US Environmental Protection Agency said a single dose of 1,000 millisieverts is enough to cause haemorrhaging. TEPCO officials said the tunnels did not flow into the sea but the possibility of radioactive water seeping into the ground could not be ruled out. Greenpeace said its experts had confirmed radiation levels of up to 10 microsieverts per hour in a village 40 km northwest of the plant. It called for the extension of a 20-km evacuation zone. Meanwhile, Plutonium was detected on Monday in soil at five places at a tsunami-stricken nuclear plant, but the levels are not believed to pose a threat to human health, the operator said.
