March 13 (Bloomberg) -- Japanese officials battling to prevent a meltdown at a nuclear power station after Friday’s record earthquake are using seawater to try and cool a reactor and prevent damage to the chamber holding its radioactive core.
An explosion at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai- Ichi nuclear power station yesterday destroyed the walls of its No. 1 reactor building and injured four people. A hydrogen leak caused the blast, which didn’t damage the steel chamber, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a briefing yesterday.oth use water to control the temperature as uranium degrades in a nuclear chain reaction at the reactors’ core, creating steam which drives a turbine to generate electricity.
The stricken Japanese reactor north of Tokyo has little parallel, however, with the Soviet plant at Chernobyl, where fundamental design faults led to a deadly serious of explosions in 1986, causing hundreds of deaths among emergency workers and contamination across Ukraine and beyond throughout Europe.
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