http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18intel.htmlWASHINGTON — The first readings from American data-collection flights over the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan show that the worst of the contamination has not spewed beyond the 18-mile range of highest concern established by Japanese authorities, but there is also no indication that another day of frantic efforts to cool nuclear fuel in the reactors and spent fuel ponds has yielded any progress, according United States government officials.
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The data was collected in the first use of the Aerial Measurement System, among the most sophisticated devices rushed to Japan by the Obama administration in an effort to help contain a nuclear crisis that the top American nuclear official said Thursday could go on for “possibly weeks.” The data show ground-level fallout of harmful radioactive pollution in the immediate vicinity of the stricken plant — a different standard than the trace amounts of radioactive particles in an atmospheric plume now projected to cover a much broader area. While the findings were reassuring in the short term, the United States declined to back away from its warning to Americans to stay at least 50 miles from the plant, a far larger perimeter than the Japanese government has established.
In interviews, American officials said their biggest worry was that a frenetic series of efforts by the Japanese military to get water into the four reactors — including water cannons and fire-fighting helicopters that dumped water but appeared to largely miss their targets — showed few signs of working.
Another effort by the Japanese, to hook electric power back up to the plant, only began on Thursday and was likely to take several days to complete — and even then it was unclear how the cooling systems, in reactor buildings battered by the tsunami and then torn apart by hydrogen explosions, would work, if at all. “What you are seeing are desperate efforts — just throwing everything at it in hopes something will work,” said one American official with long nuclear experience, who would not speak for attribution. “Right now this is more prayer than plan.”
After a day in which American and Japanese officials had radically different assessments of the danger of what is spewing from the plants, the two governments attempted Thursday to join forces. Experts met in Tokyo to compare notes. The United States, with Japanese permission, began to put intelligence-collection aircraft over the site, in hopes of gaining a view for Washington as well as its allies in Tokyo that did not rely on the announcements of officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Officials say they suspect that company has consistently underestimated the risk and moved too slowing to contain the damage. Aircraft normally used to monitor North Korea’s nuclear weapons activities — a Global Hawk drone and U-2 spy planes — were flying missions over the reactor, trying to help the Japanese government map out its response to the quake, the tsunami and now the nuclear disaster.
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