April 6, 2011
Workers at Japan’s crippled atomic power plant on Wednesday plugged a hole spewing highly radioactive water into the ocean, boosting efforts to contain the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
But in an illustration of how fragile progress is at the Fukushima plant, operator Tokyo Electric Power said it was now concerned that a build-up of hydrogen gas at a different reactor could cause another explosion at the site.
The firm has said it may inject nitrogen gas into the reactor container to prevent a possible explosion from the hydrogen build-up.
Workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant are concerned that hydrogen gas in the container of reactor number 1, produced by the fission process, could react violently if it comes into contact with a lot of oxygen.
The plugged water leak meanwhile was sealed after TEPCO workers injected sodium silicate, a chemical agent known as “water glass”, to solidify soil near a cracked pit where water had been escaping into the Pacific.
This article was posted: Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 4:49 am