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Japan minister visits nuke plant amid safety worry TOKYO – Japan's environment and nuclear minister visited the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Saturday to inspect a spent fuel pool at the center of safety concerns and said it appeared to have been properly reinforced. The visit by Goshi Hosono, apparently aimed at demonstrating the safety of the facility, came amid renewed concerns about conditions at the plant's No. 4 reactor after its operator reported a bulging of the building's wall. Nuclear regulators ordered a new investigation and seismic tests of the building and its pool. The building was...

Major new leak at Japan's nuclear plant - Kyodo 01 Feb 2012 22:38 Source: reuters // Reuters Feb 2 (Reuters) - More than 8 tonnes of water have leaked from Japan's stricken nuclear power plant after a frozen pipe burst inside a reactor buiding, but none of the water is thought to have escaped the complex, Kyodo news agency said on Thursday. Kyodo, quoting the Fukushima plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), said the water had leaked from the No.4 reactor when a pipe "dropped off" but that the liquid had all been contained inside the reactor building. The...

Big Mess Damaged equipment and piping are shown on the fourth floor of the No. 4 reactor building at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, in this photo released Sunday by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO).

TEPCO forced to review reactor 4 cooling plan The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been forced to reconsider its plan to cool the spent fuel storage pool of the No.4 reactor. Water injection from a special vehicle has not been intense enough to cool the water in the pool, allowing the temperature to remain at more than 80 degrees Celsius. Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, aims to install a circulatory cooling system that will pump water out of the pool and return it there as coolant. The utility originally hoped to put the system in...

High concentration of radioactive water found in Fukushima's No. 4 reactor A concentration of radioactive water in the basement of the No. 4 reactor's turbine building at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant became abnormally high, reaching a maximum of 250 times normal monthly levels, according to Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) on April 26. Radioactive water may be leaking from the basement of the nearby No. 3 reactor's turbine building and the water level there is on the rise, TEPCO sources say, as the ongoing crisis at the power plant continues following heavy damage by the March...

OUTSIDE, a hard winter's afternoon settles on the village, but inside their cottage Nikolai and Nastia lay out a spread: apples from their orchard, pickles from their garden, mushrooms from the woods around and full glasses of samogon, otherwise known as Ukrainian moonshine. Samogon, the locals say, offers protection from radioactivity, a consideration since we are in a "black village" written off for human occupation in 1986 after the explosion of Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station a mere dozen miles away. "You grow your own food?" a guest asks. "All of it," Nastia says. The guest takes...