Teams race to restore power to nuke plant

OSAKA, Japan (AFP) - Engineers at a stricken nuclear power plant in Japan were close to restoring power to vital cooling systems Saturday as they scrambled to prevent a full-blown meltdown, officials said.

Electricity was expected to be reconnected to four reactor units at the Fukushima No. 1 plant on Saturday and to the other two Sunday, more than a week after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, the nuclear safety agency said.

The announcement offered some hope of a breakthrough in efforts to prevent a major radiation leak from the troubled facility, although it is not yet clear whether the cooling system will work properly even if power is restored.

Emergency services resumed spraying water at the number three reactor using specially equipped fire trucks and said they were stepping up the dousing, aiming for round-the-clock operations.

Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said surface temperatures at the plant "seem to be stable" at no more than 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees F).

Tons of water have been used to douse overheating fuel rods in what the head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has described as "a race against time" to prevent a major disaster.

Plant operator TEPCO has not ruled out the last-resort option of entombing the plant in sand and concrete as Russia did with the Chernobyl plant in 1986, but says it is still focusing its efforts on cooling the facility.

The company said it had installed an external power line to the plant, located about 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Tokyo, and was battling to reconnect reactor units, starting with the least damaged unit.

"We are still working to lay the power line for a distance of 1.5 kilometers (one mile) to reconnect the reactor number two. We are struggling in this work," a TEPCO spokesman said.

Industrial giant Hitachi reportedly sent 80 workers to help lay electricity lines and other equipment to restore power.

Four of the plant's six reactor units -- numbers one to four -- have been in danger of spewing dangerous amounts of radioactivity, following a series of hydrogen explosions and fires at buildings housing the troubled reactors.

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake last week, followed by monster tsunami waves and aftershocks, knocked out the power supply, including generators for emergency use, at the plant on the Pacific coast.

Authorities have since struggled to keep the fuel rods inside reactors, and fuel storage containment pools, under water.

If they are exposed to air, they could degrade further and emit large amounts of radioactive material.

TEPCO said Saturday that its engineers had bored holes in the roofs of the buildings housing reactors five and six to avoid a potential explosion of hydrogen gas.

Japan's nuclear safety agency on Friday raised the Fukushima crisis level to five from four on the international scale of gravity for atomic accidents, which goes up to seven.

The decision puts Fukushima on the same level as the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and makes it the worst ever in Japan.

"This is a very grave and serious accident," the Japanese head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, said Friday after meeting Prime Minister Naoto Kan in Tokyo.

후쿠시마 원자로 4개 전력복구 총력

(오사카) 대규모 방사선 유출 우려가 고조되고 있는 후쿠시마 제1원자력발전소의 원자로 4곳에 이르면 19일 중으로 전력공급이 재개될 전망이다.

원전 운영사인 도쿄전력은 제1원전 원자로 4기에 이날 중으로 전력이 공급되고 나머지 2기는 20일에 전력이 공급될 것으로 예상하고 있다고 밝혔다.

도쿄전력에 따르면 원자로 5호기와 6호기에는 디젤 발전기를 통해 전력 공급이 재개됐으며 원자로 2호기에도 임시 변전소와 송전선을 연결하는 작업이 진행되고 있다.

도쿄전력은 이날 성명을 통해 "원전에 외부 송전선을 연결했으며 이를 통해 전력이 공급될 수 있음을 확인했다"고 밝혔다. (연합뉴스)