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Site-saving workers evacuated from Japanese reactor disaster

If radiation drops, they will return.

16th March 2011 05:07 GMT nes

The Japanese government has ordered the evacuation of

the 50 remaining workers at the Fukushima Daiichi (No. 1) plant,

thus bringing at minimum a temporary halt to the efforts to cool

the distressed reactors at that increasingly troubled nuclear power plant.

"Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said work on dousing reactors

with water was disrupted by the need to withdraw," reported New

Delhi Television and other news outlets.

TV quoted Edano as saying: "So the workers cannot carry out

even minimal work at the plant now. Because of the radiation risk,

we are on standby." Although the workers have been wi

"from 1,000 millisieverts on Wednesday morning to 600-800,"

according to the tv.japanese

The "standby" status follows a second fire at the plant's

No. 4 reactor, which broke out on Wednesday, Japan time. T

he International Business Times reported that that fire had

extinguished itself within a half an hour, but other reports

note that it is impossible to tell if the fire is extinguished,

due to the inability to get close enough to the radioactive

site to effectively inspect it.

disaster

If the pool in which reactor No. 4's fuel rods are currently

boiling away their protective water can be somehow refilled

perhaps from helicopters, although the roof of the building

housing that reactor unfortunately wasn't blown away in previous

mishaps, which would have allowed for water drops there's a

good chance that the reactor's fuel rods' ziconium tubes won't

burst.

If those tubes are not cooled, however, and do catch fire

and burst, they'd release the radioactive materials inside

them, which would engender a release of radioactivity "thousands

of times higher than the levels currently measured at the site,"

according to The Washington Post.

At this point in time, there's no way of knowing the pool's

condition. If the pool at reactor No. 4 is damaged and leaking,

it may be impossible to pour enough cooling water into it to

keep the fuel rods covered and cooled.

At reactors Nos. 5 and 6, to make matters worse, the water

level is also dropping: the International Atomic Energy

Agency reported at 3:55 UTC on Wednesday (11:55pm Tuesday

in New York) that the water level in the containment pool

in reactor No. 5 was "201 cm above the top of the fuel.

This was a 40 cm decrease since 07:00 UTC of 15 March."

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