Cooling pumps still idle at imperiled Japanese reactors - food banned from Fukushima Prefecture

[jpak]

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci--japan-reactor-damage-20110320,0,7441237.story

Progress restoring power to the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has apparently stalled after a full day of work Sunday, although the situation has not deteriorated any further.

Officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant 140 miles north of Tokyo, said they had managed to restore power to a switchboard at the No. 2 reactor at the plant, but have not yet been able to restore coolant flow in the reactor.

Meanwhile, Japanese health authorities have banned the sale of milk and vegetables from the prefecture in which the power plant is located because they have been contaminated by radioactive fallout, although officials claim the levels are not yet high enough to present a danger to human health.

After stringing a new power line to the plant from the electric grid, company officials reported on Saturday that they had reconnected coolant pumps in reactor Nos. 5 and 6 and restored the flow of water to the spent fuel cooling pools in those buildings. In the day since, temperatures in those pools have returned to near normal.

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[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Not deteriorating any further is good news too

:-)

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Yeah..but....still spewing radiation is not good news.

It is like bleeding to death, if the flow does not get worse but is unstoppable, I consider that not good news.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Yeah but that means that they can now reverse it

they are now at a stable casualty... so things should start to go to the side of solving this. Oh and we have now stepped away from the actual worst case, which mid last week they were moving fast towards... no three reactor cores is not healthy, but better than twelve. And if they manage to do this, then it should get to the oint of control (by a sarcophagus)...

[VermeerLives]

4. Even with successful cooling

of all the reactors, those that are ruined have to be either entombed and stored or dismantled, processed and stored which sounds hazardous. Some large quantity of waste is going to end up encased in concrete somewhere.