Radioactive iodine in seawater around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant dropped sharply even before workers plugged a water leak believed to be from its crippled No. 2 reactor, the plant's owner said Wednesday night.
Stopping the flow of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean was a key victory for workers who have struggled to keep the earthquake-damaged plant's reactors from overheating for nearly four weeks. But the Tokyo Electric Power Co. and a top Japanese official warned the fight was far from over.
Concentrations of iodine-131 had been as high as 7.5 million times legal standards in water directly behind the plant after the leak was discovered Saturday. They had dropped to less than 4 percent of that amount in the 24 hours before the leak had been cut off Wednesday morning, according to figures released by Tokyo Electric.
The level remained 280,000 times higher than the legal limit, but those concentrations were dropping sharply as the water flowed out into the Pacific. Levels of longer-lived cesium-137 were down sharply as well but remained 61,000 times the legal standard, according to Tokyo Electric's water sampling data.
Samples from a monitoring point 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) southeast of the plant found iodine-131 levels down to 1.5 times legal levels, with no reading for cesium.
Japanese authorities said they believe the leaking water was part of the 8 metric tons (2,100 gallons) per hour being pumped in the No. 2 reactor, one of three that suffered core damage after the massive earthquake that struck northern Japan on March 11. The water has been leaking into the basement of the unit's turbine plant, carrying with it radioactive particles that are the byproduct of nuclear reactors.
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I think tahat this toxic enviorment can effect in animals including humans and can be a catastrofy and a cause and be allot of deads
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