No quick fix seen at Japan's nuclear plant
<p>A man sits on stone steps as he watches a recovery operation near his shelter in Minanisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, Monday, after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami devastated the area.</p>
FUKUSHIMA, Japan (AP) - Officials raced Monday to restore electricity to Japan's leaking nuclear plant, but getting the power flowing will hardly be the end of their battle: With its mangled machinery and partly melted reactor cores, bringing the complex under control is a monstrous job.
Restoring the power to all six units at the tsunami-damaged complex is key, because it will, in
theory, power up the maze of motors, valves and switches that help deliver cooling water to the overheated reactor cores and spent fuel pools that are leaking radiation.
Ideally, officials believe it should only take a day to get the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear under control once the cooling system is up and running. In reality, the effort to end the crisis is likely to take weeks.
Late Monday night, the deputy director general of Japan's nuclear safety body suggested to reporters why there is so much uncertainty about when the job will be finished.
"We have experienced a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected," said Hidehiko Nishiyama of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
The nuclear plant's cooling systems were wrecked by the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11. Since then, conditions at the plant have been volatile; a plume of smoke rose from two reactor units Monday, prompting workers to evacuate.
Problems set off by the disasters have ranged far beyond the shattered northeast coast and the wrecked nuclear plant, handing the government what it has called Japan's worst crisis since World War II. Rebuilding may cost as much as $235 billion. Police estimate the death toll will surpass 18,000.
Traces of radiation are tainting vegetables and some water supplies, although in amounts the government and health experts say do not pose a risk to human health in the short term. That has caused the government to ban sale of raw milk, spinach and canola from prefectures over a swath from the plant toward Tokyo. The government has just started to test fish and shellfish.