Tokyo: Two workers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station who had been missing for several days are confirmed dead, the operator of the plant announced Sunday.
Spokesman of the Tokyo Electric Power Co said the workers had been missing since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. He said the bodies were found Wednesday and had to be decontaminated. The announcement was delayed out of consideration for the families, he added.
After the massive tsunami, radiation has been discharging from the plant since the tsunami tapped out cooling systems there, causing the reactors to dangerously overheat.
Engineers failed to seal a crack where highly radioactive water was spilling into the Pacific from a Japanese nuclear plant incapacitated by last month’s tsunami, but the spokesman said a search of the site found no other leaks Sunday.
A series of almost daily problems has led to substantial amounts of radiation leaking into the atmosphere, ground and sea in the world’s worst nuclear crisis since the 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union.
The disaster carved a path of destruction up and down the northeastern coast and is believed to have left about 25,000 dead. Sunday marks the last day of an all-out joint search by the US and Japanese militaries for bodies in coastal waters. The effort is probably the final hope for retrieving the dead. So far, 12,000 deaths have been confirmed, and another 15,400 people are missing.
The bodies of the workers were discovered from an 8-inch- (20-centimeter-) long crack in a maintenance pit at the Fukushima plant that was believed to have been caused by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that generated the wave. Water containing levels of radioactive iodine far above the legal limit spilled from it into the Pacific, the official said.
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