Braving the risk of radiation exposure, emergency workers at the quake-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant today battled to cool the overheating reactors, as Japan sought the US help to contain the atomic crisis described by the IAEA as "extremely serious".
The unprecedented cooling mission, launched yesterday by the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) by spraying tonnes of water over the plant's No.3 reactor, continued for the second day, apart from efforts to restore power to some of the affected reactors' cooling systems, authorities said.
SDF fire trucks shot 50 tonnes of water at a spent fuel pool of the No.3 reactor, a day after military helicopters dumped water in an attempt to prevent a meltdown of fuel rods, Kyodo news agency reported. The Tokyo Fire Department is also expected to join the operation at the Fukushima plant.
"This is the largest crisis for Japan," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said during his meeting with visiting IAEA chief Yukiya Amano, adding that "every organisation (of the government)...Is making all-out efforts to deal with the problem."
Soon after arriving in Tokyo, Amano, a Japanese national who was accompanied by a four-member team of nuclear experts, said: "We see it (the nuclear crisis) as an extremely serious accident."
"The international community is extremely concerned about this issue, and it's important to cooperate in dealing with it," he said, adding it was a race against clock.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, meanwhile, was quoted as saying by the media that the Japanese authorities were coordinating with the US as to what help Washington "can provide and what people really need."
On the efforts to cool down overheating reactors, Edano said the fire department's trucks may be pressed into action to help douse a spent nuclear fuel pool at the No.1 reactor. Although it does not pose as imminent a threat as the No.3 and No.4 reactors of releasing radioactive material into the air.
Edano said radiation levels near the Fukushima plant "do not pose immediate adverse effects on the human body."
The spent fuel pools at the power station lost their cooling function in the wake of the March 11 quake of magnitude 9 and devastating tsunami, which left over 16,000 people dead or unaccounted for.
Radiation readings at the troubled nuclear plant consistently followed a downward path throughout this morning, according to data taken roughly one kilometre west of the plant's No.2 reactor, but the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) stopped short of calling the move a trend, Kyodo said.
However, it is not possible to monitor the water levels and the temperatures of the pools in the No.1 to 4 reactors of the plant housing a total of six reactors.
