Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive - Workers struggle to plug leak at Japan nuclear plant « - CNN.com Blogs

Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive - Workers struggle to plug leak at Japan nuclear plant « - CNN.com Blogs: "CNN Wire Staff

Tokyo (CNN) - A first attempt to plug a cracked concrete shaft that is leaking highly radioactive water into the ocean off Japan failed Saturday, so officials are now exploring alternatives, spokesmen for Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

Power plant workers had been trying to fill the shaft with fresh concrete, but that did not change the amount of water coming out of the crack, the spokesmen said at a news conference that ran late into the night Saturday.

Their 'plan B' is to use polymers to stop the leak, the spokesmen said. A Tokyo Electric expert will visit the site Sunday morning and decide what polymer to use before the work begins.

Workers will then break the shaft's ceiling and insert the polymer in a different spot from where they tried to place the concrete, they said.

Water from the 2-meter-deep, concrete-lined basin has been seen escaping into the ocean through a roughly 20-centimeter (8-inch) crack, the company said earlier Saturday. The shaft lies behind the turbine plant of the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was heavily damaged in the earthquake and resulting tsunami last month.

Radiation levels in the shaft have been measured at more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour, which is more than 330 times the dose an average resident of an industrialized country naturally receives in a year. Radioactivity above the shaft was measured at 250 millisieverts per hour, said Tokyo Electric, the plant's owner.

Tokyo Electric said it is discussing other methods to use should the polymer fail, but it hasn't identified what those other methods may be.

The discovery of the leak comes after a feverish effort in recent days to explain a sharp spike in contamination in seawater measured just off the plant. Tokyo Electric said the shaft lies next to the water intake for the plant's steam condenser, at the end of a long channel that has been filling with radioactive water for several days.

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