Posted on 03/19/2011 9:49:22 PM PDT by SteveH
Engineers had run a power line to the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo, from the country's electrical grid Friday night, but connecting it to the buildings at the facility has been a bigger problem than anticipated. Workers have been able to spend only limited amounts of time in the facility to make the connections, and engineers have had to laboriously go through and check all the circuitry before power is turned on to ensure that a surge of current does not create more problems than it solves.
Officials of the company had said they hoped to get power restored to all of the six buildings at the facility by Sunday, but that estimate now seems overly optimistic. Engineers have been focusing their efforts on reactors No. 2 and 3 and the building housing reactor No. 4, which also houses a damaged spent fuel pool, but the need to build shelters to protect workers and equipment from the water that was being sprayed, as well as the radiation, delayed efforts.
Reactor No. 2 is thought to have a cracked containment vessel and is thus believed to be potentially the most problematic reactor. Reactor No. 3 is not known to be damaged, but its fuel rods contain a mixture of uranium and plutonium. Plutonium is highly carcinogenic in even very small quantities, and a leak of the material would be considered disastrous.
The pool at reactor No. 4 has the hottest spent fuel and is thought to have either holes in the walls of the pool or some other type of leak that is allowing water to run out. It is thus imperative to cool those heat sources first.
Sounds like they’re slowly getting the situation under control.
Not that the MSM (or many FReepers) will care.
Either I missed something, or this headline is misleading. The article says nothing about any electricity being available at the plant. It does talk about a host of problems that is delaying the turning on of power. It is clear that the latest plan to get power turned on is not going to happen.
Methinks that now that Obama has spoken on Japan, the MSM has moved from mass hysteria to an "all is well" tone.
“thought” and “believed”, yet no sources.
Press releases by TEPCO indicate no such thing.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/
The 'drive-by media' has already moved on the Lybian conflict. They have successfully portrayed this as a disaster that has lead to the deaths of millions of Japanese that will leave the entire Pacific Rim as a wasteland for ten thousand years so there is no need for them to report on the story anymore.
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