Nuclear firm says it has no blueprint to resolve crisis

Net result ... tuna were unloaded for the first time since the March 11 tsunami yesterday. Photo: AP/Kyodo

TOKYO: The operator of the damaged nuclear power plant in Japan has admitted it has no detailed blueprint to end the nuclear crisis, now more than a month old.
The admission coincided with workers at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant beginning the painstaking task of pumping thousands of tonnes of highly radioactive water into nearby containers to enable the repair of crucial cooling functions.
Yesterday hundreds of police in white protective suits started searching for the first time for bodies in the rubble within 10 kilometres of the complex.

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Police said that falling radiation levels allowed them to search within a narrower radius of the plant than before.
The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, also plans to seek government approval to start a nuclear reactor shut after a 2007 earthquake to help ease power shortages caused by the loss of the Fukushima plant.
The reactor at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the world's biggest nuclear station, was capable of supplying electricity this year, said the president of Tepco, Masataka Shimizu. ''I would like to get approval to restart the No. 3 reactor early, this year if possible.''
Japan has experienced rolling blackouts since the earthquake and tsunami five weeks ago and faces more power shortages as temperatures rise.
Three of seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa station are closed while Tepco strengthens structures to improve their resistance to earthquakes. Work could continue at two units while unit 3 was restarted, Mr Shimizu said.
Local government approval is required for a restart. There would be no progress on starting the reactors until Tepco resolved the problems at Fukushima, Takehiko Katagiri, a spokesman for the city of Kashiwazaki, said on April 6.
Philip White, of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre in Tokyo, said: ''This 'operations first, safety second' approach and the failure to learn the lessons from the 2007 quake was the cause of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. How many more disasters will it take?''
Tepco also announced plans to move backup power for the reactors at Fukushima to higher elevations further from the ocean, in case another tsunami struck.
The power units will be moved to sites 20 metres above sea level, from the current 10 metres. The Fukushima plant was hit by a tsunami surge as high as 15 metres on March 11.
Authorities said small amounts of strontium had been found for the first time in the soil near the plant. Strontium is one of the most harmful radioactive elements and has been linked with leukaemia, but the levels found at Daiichi were said not to be harmful to humans.
Mr Shimizu admitted that the company was still working on a master plan to end the crisis.
Police believe the 10-kilometre zone around the Fukushima plant may contain 1000 bodies. At least 13,400 people were killed as a result of the earthquake and the tsunami.

pan's fragile post-disaster political truce unravelled on Thursday as the head of the main opposition party called on unpopular Prime Minister Naoto Kan to quit over his handling of the country's natural calamities and a nuclear crisis.
At the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant in the northeast of the country, engineers were struggling to find a new way to cool one of the six crippled reactors and Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said it was now "highly likely" there was a hole in the suppression unit of the reactor.
Kan, whose public support stands at about 30 percent, had sought a grand coalition to help the country recover from its worst ever natural disaster and enact bills to pay for the country's biggest reconstruction project since World War Two.
Kan's Democratic Party controls parliament's lower house but needs opposition help to pass bills because it lacks a majority in the upper chamber, which can block legislation.
But the head of the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) -- who last week ruled out joining hands -- on Thursday pressured Kan to go.
"The time has come for (the prime minister) to decide whether he stays or goes," Kyodo news agency quoted Sadakazu Tanigaki as telling a news conference.

Tanigaki's comment reflects the view of many in his conservative party that Kan must step down as a precondition for any coalition as well as a hope that criticism of Kan within his own Democratic Party will gather steam after party powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa blasted the premier over his crisis management.
Upper House speaker Takeo Nishioka, a well-known Kan critic from the Democrats, also urged Kan to resign, Kyodo said.
Kan, however, who took office as Japan's fifth leader since 2006 last June, is not likely to step down readily, while opposition parties could come under fire if they try to take disaster budgets hostage in a political battle, analysts said.
"Kan will probably ignore this," said Koichi Nakano, a Sophia University professor. "If they thought of the national interests, would they (Kan's critics) do this now?"


Officials did not estimate how many bodies may be in the area being searched. The National Police Agency placed the death toll at more than 13,400, with the number of missing at more than 14,800.
Radioactive material has been leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi plant since the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck the northeast coast on March 11. The tsunami wave that struck the power plant may have been as high as 50 feet, said its operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company.
Thursday’s search is the closest the police have come to the Fukushima plant since the nuclear crisis began and is well within the 12-mile evacuation zone around the plant. Authorities have recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of 19 miles.
On Thursday, workers were continuing to remove radioactive water from the basements of the No. 1 and No. 3 reactor turbine buildings, as well as from underground tunnels.
Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said Thursday that water levels in a part of the tunnel had increased slightly, probably because of the continuous amount of water being injected into the No. 2 reactor to keep it cool.
This week, Japan’s government raised its rating of the severity of the accident at the Daiichi plant to 7, the worst on an international scale for measuring nuclear disasters.
Meanwhile, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, asked a government panel on Thursday to develop proposals for rebuilding the areas devastated by the earthquake and tsunami. Mr. Kan, who has called the natural disaster the greatest crisis facing Japan since World War II, asked the panel to deliver proposals by the end of June.