Japan nuclear crisis: Fukushima shutdown for January
Baku, May 18 (AZERTAC). Japan still believes it can end its nuclear crisis within months, while accepting damage from March`s quake and tsunami was worse than first thought, BBC reported.
The government and the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant recently revealed the No 1 reactor suffered a near complete meltdown within hours of the disaster.
But they still believe a "cold shutdown" is possible by January.
The crisis forced 80,000 people who lived within 20km of the plant to flee.
This week evacuations began from towns further away from the stricken plant in northern Japan, with the government saying a build-up of radiation could pose a danger to health, says the BBC`s Roland Buerk in Tokyo.
In recent days the plant`s operator has revealed that the damage sustained by the reactors immediately after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami was far more severe than initially thought.
Officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) say fuel rods at the plant began to melt down as early as six hours after the 11 March tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems.
Officials said the fuel in reactors number 2 and 3 was also exposed to the air and might have largely melted too.
The discovery has forced Tepco to abandon a plan to flood the reactors to cool them in a process known as "water entombment".
Instead, says our correspondent, workers will try to set up a stable cooling system by circulating the water already there.
Tepco also said it would step up its monitoring of radiation in nearby seawater and study what could be done to prevent contamination of groundwater.
But the company says it intends to stick to the timetable it announced last month, to bring the power station to a cold shutdown by January.
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