Suicide Fighters' Injured in Nuke Crisis.

Suicide Fighters' Injured in Nuke Crisis.

Key details:

Water dropped by helicopters seems to blow away in wind
At least 19 workers hurt, 20 exposed to radiation
Four of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant's six reactors have faced serious crises

U.S. says Americans should consider leaving Japan
Aid workers, victims, regional officials appeal for help
More than 5,300 officially listed as dead, but toll expected to top 10,000

Japan tried high-pressure water cannons, fire trucks and even helicopters that dropped batches of seawater in increasingly frantic attempts Thursday to cool an overheated nuclear complex as U.S. officials warned the situation was deteriorating.

Two Japanese military CH-47 Chinook helicopters began dumping seawater on the complex's damaged Unit 3 at 9:48 a.m. (8:48 p.m. EDT), defense ministry spokeswoman Kazumi Toyama said. The choppers dumped at least four loads on the reactor in just the first 10 minutes, though television footage showed much of it appearing to disperse in the wind.

Chopper crews flew missions of about 40 minutes each to limit their radiation exposure, passing over the reactor with loads of about about 2,000 gallons of water.

The dousing is aimed at cooling the Unit 3 reactor, as well as replenishing water in that unit's cooling pool, where used fuel rods are stored, Toyama said. The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), said earlier that pool was nearly empty, which would cause the rods to overheat and emit even more radiation.
Along with the helicopter water drops, military vehicles designed to extinguish fires at plane crashes were being used to spray the crippled Unit 3, military spokesman Mitsuru Yamazaki said. The high-pressure sprayers were to allow emergency workers to get water into the damaged unit while staying safely back from areas deemed to have too much radiation.

But special police units trying to use water cannons — normally used to quell rioters — failed in their attempt to cool the unit when the water failed to reach its target from safe distances, said Yasuhiro Hashimoto, a spokesman for the Nuclear And Industrial Safety Agency.

Officials at TEPCO said they believed they were making headway in staving off a catastrophe both with the spraying and with efforts to complete an emergency power line to restart the plant's own cooling systems.
The interim power line would be a temporary but "reliable" way to cool down the reactors and storage pools, said Teruaki Kobayashi, a facilities management official at TEPCO.

This is a first step toward recovery," he said.

Japan will continue dropping water from the air on the Unit 3 reactor on Friday, the country's nuclear safety agency said on Thursday night.

Four of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant's six reactors have faced serious crises involving fires, explosions, damage to the structures housing reactor cores, partial meltdowns or rising temperatures in the pools used to store spent nuclear fuel. Officials also recently announced that temperatures are rising in the spent fuel pools of the last two reactors.

The troubles at the nuclear complex were set in motion by last week's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and destroyed backup generators needed for the reactors' cooling systems. That added a nuclear crisis on top of twin natural disasters that likely killed well more than 10,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said at a congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from unit No. 4's spent fuel pool. Jaczko said anyone who gets close to the plant could face potentially lethal doses of radiation.
"We believe radiation levels are extremely high," he said.

TEPCO executives said Thursday that they believed the rods in that pool were covered with water, but an official with Japan's nuclear safety agency later expressed skepticism about that and moved closer to the U.S. position.

"Considering the amount of radiation released in the area, the fuel rods are more likely to be exposed than to be covered," Yuichi Sato said.

The top U.S. nuclear regulatory official gave a far bleaker assessment of the crisis than the Japanese, and the U.S. ambassador warned U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the plant on the northeast coast to leave the area or at least remain indoors.

The Japanese government said it had no plans to expand its mandatory, 12-mile exclusion zone around the plant along the northeastern coast, while also urging people within 20 miles to stay inside.
IAEA chief heads to Japan

The head of the U.N. atomic watchdog said he would like to visit the site on Thursday as he departed for Tokyo to glean details about the escalating crisis.

"The situation continues to be very serious," International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano told reporters at the Vienna airport as he left with a small group of nuclear experts.

"We wish to go to the site, but we will discuss it upon our arrival. "This is a very serious accident, but Japan is not alone; the international community is standing by Japan," he said.

Suicide Fighters' Injured in Nuke Crisis.