From the Vancouver Sun – May 13, 2011

by Julian Ryall, Daily Telegraph

One of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant did
sustain a nuclear meltdown, Japanese officials admitted for the first
time on Thursday, describing finding a pool of molten fuel at the bottom
of the reactor’s containment vessel.

Engineers from the Tokyo
Electric Power company (Tepco) entered the No. 1 reactor at the end of
last week for the first time since the March 11 tsunami and saw the top
1.5 metres or so of the core’s threemetre-long fuel rods had been
exposed to the air and melted down.

Previously, Tepco believed
that the core of the reactor was submerged in enough water to keep it
stable and that only 55 per cent of the core had been damaged. Now, the
company is worried that the molten pool of radioactive fuel may have
burned a hole through the bottom of the containment vessel, causing a
leak of highly radioactive water.

“We will have to revise our
plans,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman for Tepco. “We cannot deny
the possibility that a hole in the pressure vessel caused water to
leak.” Tepco has not clarified what other barriers there are to stop
radioactive fuel leaking if the steel containment vessel has been
breached. Greenpeace said the situation could escalate rapidly if “the
lava melts through the vessel.”

However, an initial plan to flood
the entire reactor core with water to keep its temperature from rising
has now been abandoned because it might exacerbate the leak.

Tepco
said there was enough water at the bottom of the vessel to keep both
the puddle of melted fuel and the remaining fuel rods cool. The company
added that it had sealed a leak of radioactive water from the No. 3
reactor after water was reportedly discovered to be flowing into the
ocean. A similar leak had discharged radioactive water into the sea in
April from the No. 2 reactor.

Greenpeace said significant amounts
of radioactive material had been released into the sea and that samples
of seaweed taken from as far as 60 km from the Fukushima plant had been
found to contain radiation well above legal limits. Of the 22 samples
tested, 10 were contaminated with five times the legal limit of iodine
131 and 20 times of cesium 137.

Seaweed is a huge part of the
Japanese diet and the average household eats almost three kilograms a
year. Fishermen are preparing to start this season’s harvest on May 20.
Inland from the plant, there has been a cull of livestock left inside
the 30-km mandatory exclusion zone with thousands of cows, horses and
pigs destroyed, including 260,000 chickens from the town of Minamisoma.