Radiation is a barrier to repair work at the plant

Workers were unable to enter four reactors of the nuclear plant of Fukushima Daiichi since the days immediately after the earthquake and the tsunami that struck on March 11. Vital plant cooling systems have been eliminated, and the explosion of hydrogen which ensued in four of the six reactors blew off the coast of their roofs and jonchaient site with radioactive debris.

Sunday, two robots were moving to two units reactor, doors opening and navigating the radioactive debris and puddles to return with readings of temperature, pressure and radioactivity. Readings, published Monday, showed high continuous radiation levels.

Unit 1, robots detected up to 49 millisieverts per hour; Unit 3, the reading was 57 millisieverts per hour. In recent weeks were much higher readings have come from areas where contaminated water has accumulated as the unit 2 turbine, where experts say the reactor under pressure can be cracked and leaks of nuclear material.

Again, the exposure of the Japan emergency workers is currently capped at 250 radiation millisieverts per year. If current levels of effectively limit a worker to a few hours of work.

"It is a harsh environment for human beings humans to work," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, Assistant Director-General to the nuclear and industrial safety agency.

He said the levels would require the operator of the plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to be "creative" by bringing the plant to a stable known state that a case of cold within six to nine months, the company set forth in a schedule Sunday.

The Japanese Government continues to severe, technical and political challenges following a multifaceted disaster which left 13 800 dead and 14 000 missing. At least 137 000 people are still in evacuation centres, of some pipes in their homes by leaks of radiation of the Fukushima plant.

Ministry of Finance of the Japan said that the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami alone could reach $ 300 billion, which makes higher global disaster. The number of victims of the nuclear disaster - which has disrupted agriculture and fishing, reduced power supply through the East of the Japan and inflicted other injuries on the economy - not a not yet be accounted for.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan were under fire Monday from opposition lawmakers who accused him of bungling the initial response to the nuclear crisis.

"Many Japanese feel that Prime Minister Kan has no leadership," Masashi Waki, a member of the main opposition, the Liberal Democratic Party, said in an unusually heated parliamentary session. Sadakazu Tanigaki, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, last week called Mr. Kan to resign.

"I do not think that my response was insufficient, as many say," a Kan excited-to research Mr. said, in the heckling. "Nonsense!"

A survey published Monday by the Nikkei business on the largest of the Japan daily, appeared in support of the claims of the opposition. 69% Of respondents say that Mr. Kan should be replaced, while 70% said that the response of the Government in the nuclear crisis was unacceptable. The Nikkei said as he surveyed 983 people across the country from April 15 to 17, excluding some areas where telephone lines is remained down.

Tokyo Electric plan ambitious to bring reactors to a cold case has also been criticized. The plan, the order of the Government, aims to give residents evacuated from the area around the plant an idea of when they might be able to return home.

But experts question the viability of the plan, which calls for building new cooling systems quickly critical. Faces of Tokyo Electric "significant obstacles" following calendar, said Haruki Madarame, President of the Commission on nuclear safety, an independent group of experts appointed by the Government to oversee the nuclear industry.

Mr. Madarame, a former Professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tokyo, told journalists Monday that the presence of highly radioactive water in unit 2 poses a particular challenge. He and other units, workers were cooling nuclear fuel at the core of the reactor and in pools of storage by pumping in hundreds of tons of water a dangerous amounts of day, producing runoff water.

"We must ensure that the schedule tight does not lead to a neglect of safety," said Mr. Madarame.

Robots could help to resolve some of the challenges. The remote PackBots used Sunday, built by iRobot of Bedford, Massachusetts, are 60 books with weapons steel gear and tractor treads. They can lift approximately 30 pounds, up and down steps, send images to an operator and transport hazardous materials kit that detects the radiation.

IRobot, which is also the popular Roomba vacuum, has delivered more than 3 800 PackBots, mainly for the Government and the army, according to Tim Trainer, a Vice-President of iRobot.

After arriving in mid-March, the robots have been programmed to open the doors of the reactor and navigate through narrow passages, said Mr. Nishiyama of the nuclear safety agency.

Robots, with stationary drone aircraft dominated by Honeywell called T-Hawks, have left engineers lifted and measures at the plant, while minimizing the exposure of workers to harmful radiation. A PackBot in a reactor of third building later Sunday.

Ken Belson and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting.

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Radiation from nuclear millions of times on limit

 Workers try to stop the spread of radiation at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.NEW: Most recent attempt to plug leak is unsuccessfulRadiation levels dropped sharply offshore, but are many times the legal limitWater in a pit that's leaking into the sea had radiation 7.5 million times above the normRadiation is detected in one fish, and radiation in seafood will now be regulated

Tokyo (CNN) -- Another attempt by Japanese officials to stop the leaking of highly radioactive water from a nuclear reactor into the ocean failed Tuesday, the country's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

A silica-based polymer dubbed "liquid glass" was pumped into the leaking shaft from below at reactor No. 2 of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Workers hoped that the substance would harden and fill gaps beneath the concrete that was poured into the shaft in a previous unsuccessful attempt, but the material did not set as hoped, NISA reported.

It was the latest of a series of setbacks Japanese authorities faced Tuesday, with the detection of radiation in a fish and news that water gushing from the nuclear plant into the Pacific had radiation levels more than millions of times above the regulatory limit.

Readings from samples taken Saturday in the concrete pit outside the turbine building of the plant's No. 2 reactor -- one of six at the crisis-plagued plant -- had radiation 7.5 million times the legal limits, said an official with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant. Newer findings, from Tuesday afternoon, showed a sizable drop to 5 million times the norm.

The utility company also noted Tuesday that the radiation levels diminished sharply a few dozen meters from the leak, consistent with their assessment that the spill might have a minimal effect on sea life. But even in these spots, radiation levels remained several hundred-thousand times the legal limit.

Both the utility and Japan's nuclear safety agency say they don't know how much water is leaking into the sea from reactor No. 2. But engineers have had to pour nearly 200 tons of water a day into the No. 2 reactor vessel to keep it cool, and regulators say they believe the leak originates there

The entire issue underlined that getting a grip on how to minimize the amount of radiation in the Pacific Ocean is the new, primary battlefront in the weeks-long crisis at the nuclear plant.

About the same time as the Tokyo Electric news, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the presence of radioactive iodine "in one sample of fresh fish" prompted authorities to regulate the radiation in seafood for the first time.

While fishing has been forbidden within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of Fukushima Daiichi, there had been no restrictions on seafood, as there were for some vegetables and milk from certain locales. Now, the same radiation standards that apply to vegetables will apply to ocean products as well.

"The "provisional ingestion limit, equivalent to vegetables and applied to fish and shellfish, will take effect immediately," the Cabinet minister said.

Earlier Tuesday, Edano apologized for the decision to intentionally dump 11,500 tons of radioactive water into the sea -- all part of the effort to curb the flow of the more toxic liquid spotted days ago rushing from outside the No. 2 unit.

The process of expelling contaminated water in the plant's water treatment facility and around several of its reactors began Monday and will take five days, a Tokyo Electric official said.

"The water contains a high level of radiation," Edano said of the liquid being dumped into the Pacific. "We are sorry for this decision we have to make."

The most contaminated batches of this water comes from outside the No. 6 reactor, likely having gotten in via groundwater (and not a breach in the unit itself), officials said. It has a concentration of iodine-131 that would be 100 times more than the maximum amount of tap water that infants could drink, and 10 times more than what would be OK in food.

Overall, the dump equates to about 3 million gallons, notes Gary Was, a nuclear engineering professor from the University of Michigan.

Yet Hidehiko Nishiyama, a NISA official, said, "We've decided that discharging the contaminated water into the sea poses no major health hazard."

Experts say this is a fair assessment, given the likelihood the contamination should quickly dilute, especially if the tainted material is largely iodine-131, which loses half its radiation every eight days.

"To put this in perspective, the Pacific Ocean holds about 300 trillion swimming pools full of water, and they are going to release about five swimming pools full," said Timothy Jorgensen, chair of the radiation safety committee at Georgetown University Medical Center. "So hopefully the churning of the ocean and the currents will quickly disperse this so that it gets to very dilute concentrations relatively quickly."

John Till, president of the South Carolina-based Risk Assessment Corp., said he does not expect to see any permanent effects on marine life, even close to the plant. However, he added that officials should monitor radiation levels closely -- in the ocean as well as in seafood that reaches restaurants and markets.

One piece of good news, according to Japanese government reports, is that airborne radiation appears to be steadily falling around northeast Japan. Two measures from 15 kilometers or less from the plant showed amounts of radioactive iodine-131 at between 2 and 3.7 times the legal standard, with levels of a far longer-lasting cesium isotope well below the official limit.

Also, utility and government officials have described conditions recently in the Fukushima Daiichi plant's reactors and spent nuclear fuel pools as generally stable. There have been exceptions -- like the new need to pump 3-meter deep water from a drain outside the Nos. 5 and 6 units for fear it could rise, enter nearby turbine buildings and short out power for the units' nuclear fuel cooling systems. But such problems aren't occuring at the same pace, or with the same apparent severity, as was evident weeks ago.

The top priority, however, is stopping the water that's been gushing directly into the Pacific through a cracked concrete shaft outside the No. 2 reactor.

Edano said Monday that the decision to dump tainted water from other reactors and the waste water treatment facility was "unavoidable" in order to ensure "the safety" of the No. 2 reactor core.

The idea is to expeditiously pump the tainted water from around the No. 2 reactor's turbine building, lowering levels inside so that water no longer rushes out into the sea, a Japanese nuclear safety official said. This comes after two attempts failed to plug the problematic crack -- one by pouring in concrete, the other using a chemical compound mixed with sawdust and newspaper.

Reactors No. 1 and No. 3, which have lower levels of water, need to be drained as well. Tokyo Electric's plan is to pump that water to other storage tanks, including some that still need to be set up. Water in and around the Nos. 5 and 6 reactors is being jettisoned directly in the sea, officials said.

Another big problem may be that authorities still don't know how exactly the gushing water got contaminated, where it came from, or how to fix potential leaks and cracks deep inside the reactor complex and nuclear fuel.

Michael Friedlander, a former senior U.S. nuclear engineer, said late Monday that authorities will continue to have problems related to excess, radioactive water -- and the need to dump some of it -- as long as they inject huge amounts in to prevent fuel rods from overheating in reactors' cores and spent fuel pools.

"This is not a one-off deal," Friedlander said of dumping radioactive water into the ocean. "This issue of water and water management is going to plague them until they can get (fully operating) long-term core cooling."

CNN's Whitney Hurst, Matt Smith and Kyung Lah and journalist Hiroo Saso contributed to this report.

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