Radioactivity levels soar in Japan seawater

World news - Asia-Pacific - msnbc.com

Radioactivity levels are soaring in seawater near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan's nuclear safety agency said on Saturday, two weeks after the nuclear power plant was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami.

Even as engineers tried to pump puddles of radioactive water from the power plant 150 miles north of Tokyo, the nuclear safety agency said tests on Friday showed radioactive iodine had spiked 1,250 times higher than normal in the seawater just offshore the plant.

A senior official from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Hidehiko Nishiyama, said the contamination posed little risk to aquatic life.

"Ocean currents will disperse radiation particles and so it will be very diluted by the time it gets consumed by fish and seaweed," he said.

He initially said the high radiation reading meant there could be damage to the reactor, but he later said it could be from venting operations to release pressure or water leakage from pipes or valves.

"There is no data suggesting a crack," he said.

Nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Friday there had not been much change in the crisis over the previous 24 hours.

"Some positive trends are continuing but there remain areas of uncertainty that are of serious concern," agency official Graham Andrew said in Vienna, adding the high radiation could be coming from steam.

When TEPCO restored power to the plant late last week, some thought the crisis would soon be over. But two weeks after the earthquake, lingering high levels of radiation from the damaged reactors has kept hampering workers' progress.

At Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear power accident in the United States, workers took just four days to stabilize the reactor, which suffered a partial meltdown. No one was injured and there was no radiation release above the legal limit.

At Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the worst nuclear accident in the world, it took weeks to "stabilize" what remained of the plant and months to clean up radioactive materials and cover the site with a concrete and steel sarcophagus.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said on Friday the situation at Fukushima was "nowhere near" being resolved.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government has prodded tens of thousands of people living in a 12- to 18-mile zone beyond the stricken complex to leave, but insisted it was not widening an evacuation zone.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has said the residents should move because it was difficult to get supplies to the area, and not because of elevated radiation.

An official at the Science Ministry however confirmed that daily radiation levels in an area 18 miles northwest of the plant had exceeded the annual limit.

Vegetable and milk shipments from near the stricken plant have been stopped, and Tokyo's residents were told this week not to give tap water to babies after contamination from rain put radiation at twice the safety level.

It dropped back to safe levels the next day, and the city governor cheerily drank tap water in front of cameras.

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