Situation at Fukushima-1 nuke plant-far from normal-IAEA

NEW YORK. March 28. KAZINFORM The situation in Japan where specialists have failed to put under control the leakage of radiation at the stricken Fukushima-1 nuclear plant, is far from normal, said director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (AEA) Yukia Amano; Kazinform refers to Itar-Tass.

Speaking in an interview with The New York Times, published this Sunday, he said that the emergency situation at the Fukushima-1 might last for weeks and even months. According to the director-general, there are apprehensions concerning the situation in premises where reactors are located. He added that there are zones, on which the agency has no information.

The IAEA head that had recently visited Japan, intimated that the country's authorities cannot say for sure up to this time whether the water level is sufficient to cool reactors and spent fuel rods. The latter provoke his greatest anxiety.

The rods are in open pools above reactors, and seawater is sprayed over them during the past several days to head off flare-ups and discharges of large radiation dozes into the atmosphere. Amano said that he is not sure that these measures are sufficient: in the director-general' s opinion, if spent fuel rods are flooded with water without restoring the operation of the cooling system, temperatures will surge up again.

The IAEA head singled out the fourth unit of the plant, in the water tank of which, according to the director, there is the reactor core. It had been withdrawn short before the earthquake and the tsunami that swooped on Japan on March 11. The core is especially radioactive, Amano emphasized.

In the meantime, the director continued, there are some positive results: for instance the power supply was partially restored at the plant. Nevertheless, this progress is clearly insufficient. Much effort should be done to put an end to this dreadful incident, the director-general said; Kazinform cites Itar-Tass.