Akio Komori, director of Japan’s nuclear-power utility, weeps after a news conference in Fukushima. (Kyodo News)
EMOTIONAL TOLL: Coffins bearing victims’ remains are lined up in a makeshift morgue in Rifu, Miyagi Prefecture, yesterday.
Japan’s nuclear experts said they’ve weighed a “Chernobyl solution” — burying their crippled reactors in tons of concrete and sand — as a last-resort option to end the meltdown crisis.
“But our priority right now is to try to cool them down first,” said the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
It was the first time the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) had mentioned the Chernobyl option, which would put the area off limits for decades — and might not even work.
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said the situation hadn’t gotten worse in the last day but added that the Japanese “are racing against the clock.”
TEPCO admits that trying to douse the white-hot reactors with tons of water, which they did today for the third straight day, is only a stopgap measure.
The best chance to avert the Chernobyl option is to restart the Fukushima Daiichi’s cooling systems, which collapsed after last week’s earthquake and tsunami.
Early today, TEPCO said it had reconnected an external power line to the plant and would begin testing pumps over the weekend.
They still have nearly a mile of cable to lay before they can hook up to the four damaged reactors and some Western analysts fear the pumps are too damaged to work.
In other developments:
* Using diesel generators, the scientists were able to restart cooling pumps at reactor 5, which largely averted damage in the catastrophe. They also bored holes in the roofs of reactors 5 and 6 to avoid explosions.
* Minuscule amounts of radioactive material reached Southern California yesterday, according to diplomats. A UN official said the radiation reaching the West Coast is “about a billion times” below the health-threatening level.
* Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan vowed to rebuild his broken country. “We are going to create Japan again from scratch,” he said.
His government also admitted it had kept citizens in the dark about the depth of the crisis.
“In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster,” said Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano.
* Survivors, rescue workers and others in the area hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami observed a minute of silence exactly one week after the quake struck.
* The official toll of casualties was raised to 7,197 dead and 10,900 missing. * The number of aftershocks from the quake exceeded 500 yesterday, with more than 260 registering a magnitude of 5 or higher.
* The governor of devastated Miyagi Prefecture said residents should consider moving to another part of Japan for up to a year while Miyagi is being rebuilt.
Experts disagree over whether the Japanese could repeat the Chernobyl solution, in which an army of Soviet workers sealed the Ukrainian reactor under mountains of sand and concrete.
“They [reactors] are kind of like a coffee maker. If you leave on the heat, they boil dry and then they crack,” said Murray Jennex, a professor at San Diego State University.
“Putting concrete on that wouldn’t help keep your coffeemaker safe. But eventually, yes, you could build a concrete shield and be done with it.”
Also, dropping heavy concrete on the reactor could cause cracks through which radiation could escape.
If the fuel rods are insulated by concrete, they would heat up faster. They might decompose the concrete floor and fall through it, authorities said.