Highly contaminated water is escaping a damaged reactor at the crippled nuclear power plant

RELATED ARTICLES Fitch cuts Japan debt rating, outlook negative India-Japan trade to touch $25 billion by 2014: Study India, Japan to increase cooperation in DMIC; infra projects

in Japan and could soon leak into the ocean, the country’s nuclear regulator warned on Monday.

The discovery raises the danger of further radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and is a further setback to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis as workers find themselves in increasingly hazardous conditions.

Radiation measuring 1,000 millisieverts per hour was detected in water in an overflow tunnel outside the plant’s Reactor No 2, Japan’s nuclear regulator said at a news conference. The maximum dose allowed for workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts in a year.

The tunnel leads from the reactor’s turbine building, where contaminated water was discovered on Saturday, to an opening just 180 feet from the sea, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

The contaminated water level is now about three feet from the exit of the vertical, U-shaped tunnel and rising, Nishiyama said.

Contaminated water was also found at tunnels leading from the No 1 and No 3 reactors, though with much lower levels of radiation. “We are unsure whether there is already an overflow” of the water out of the tunnel, Nishiyama said. He said workers were redoubling efforts to first remove the water from the Reactor No 2 turbine building. Government officials have said that the water is probably leaking from broken pipes inside the reactor, from a breach in the reactor’s containment vessel or from the inner pressure vessel that houses the nuclear fuel.

The agency also reported that radioactive iodine 131 was detected Sunday at a concentration 1,150 times the maximum allowable level in a seawater sample taken about a mile north of the drainage outlets of reactor units 1 through 4. It also said that the amount of cesium 137 found in water about 1,000 feet from plant was 20 times the normal level, roughly equal to readings taken a week ago.

Nishiyama said there were no health concerns because fishing would not be conducted in the evacuation-designated area within about 12 miles of the plant, the Kyodo news agency reported. Monday’s disclosure about the escaping contaminated water came as workers pressed their efforts to remove highly radioactive water from inside buildings at the plant.

The high levels of radioactivity have made it harder for them to get inside the reactor buildings and control rooms to get equipment working again, slowing the effort to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools.