A radiation leak at a Japanese reactor has tainted spinach and milk at nearby farms and spread radioactive iodine in drinking water as far away as Tokyo, placing fresh pressure on emergency teams scrambling to restore cooling systems and bring dangerously overheated fuel under control.
Japan's Health Ministry confirmed on Saturday that the radioactive iodine found in drinking water in Fukushima prefecture was above government safety limits.
The prefecture is the site of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant where workers have been scrambling to prevent leaks of radiation after the facility was damaged by last week's tsunami.
The ministry said in a statement that iodine levels slightly above the limit were detected on Thursday. By Saturday, those levels had fallen well below the benchmark.
Tap water in Tokyo, some 200 kilometres south of the nuclear plant, and five other areas also tested positive for trace amounts of radioactive iodine on Saturday.
A spokesperson for the prefecture's disaster response team said drinking one litre of affected water on Thursday was the equivalent of receiving 188th of the radiation from a chest X-ray.
A government spokesperson said the amount of iodine found in Tokyo's water did not exceed government safety limits, however usual tests show no iodine.
"We more or less do not expect to see anything worse than what we are seeing now," Hidehiko Nishiyama of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said, urging restraint and reassuring residents that the crisis had reached its tip.
Authorities, meantime, continued to battle for control of the Fukushima nuclear complex on Saturday, attempting to bring the cooling systems online, although there was doubt power could be restored.
Firefighters also pumped tons of water directly from the ocean into the plant's Unit 3, where fuel rods threatened to overheat and spew radioactive material into the environment.
"Meltdowns are in fact underway; there is little doubt of that now," CTV's Tom Walters told News Channel in a phone interview from Osaka, Japan on Saturday. "There is partial melting of reactor cores; it is very much a race against time to trying to prevent full meltdowns and breaches of containment vessels."
On Saturday it was confirmed that radiation levels high enough to taint nearby food stores had already escaped the plant, which was crippled by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11. The quake and a massive tsunami crushed Japan's east coats, killing at least 7,700 people and leaving more than 11,600 people missing.
Tainted milk was found 30 kilometres from the plant, while the spinach was collected as far as 100 kilometres south, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo.
Edano said the products exceeded the government's radiation limits but did not pose an immediate health risk. Other food shipments could be halted if tests show further contamination.
"It's not like if you ate it right away you would be harmed," Edano said. "It would not be good to continue to eat it for some time."
The farmland found in the affected area features rich soil known for growing melons, rice and peaches, suggesting further contamination could become a major concern.
Edano added that the situation at the Fukushima plant did not appear to be deteriorating, although it still remained unpredictable.
Japanese officials at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency said the crisis at the plant appeared to be stabilizing, with near-constant dousing of dangerously overheated reactors and uranium fuel, but added that the situation was still far from resolved -- comments echoed by Graham Andrew, a senior aide to IAEA chief Yukiya Amano.
"The risk is reducing day by day," Andrew said. "Things are going in the right direction.
"But could we have something unexpected? Most certainly."
Amano was even more cautious, in comments to reporters at Vienna airport after a one-day trip to Tokyo to assess the situation.
"I have seen strengthened activities and felt a very strong commitment to fight against this incident and to recover safety ... and the fact is that activities are increasing," he said. But, "I don't think it is time to say that things are going in a good direction or not."
Questions remain about how quickly the government responded to the threat and quickly they decided to pour sea water into the reactor -- a move that helped moderate the reactor's temperature but will ultimately end its working life.
"Once you pour sea water into a reactor, that reactor will never operate again. That is a desperate move to bring it under control," Walters said. "Certainly there is strong indication that the Japanese dithered and delayed for a day when they could have been cooling those reactor cores faster."
Low levels of radiation have been detected as far away as Tokyo, some 220 kilometres south of the plant, but only the plant itself has experienced hazardous levels.
Authorities had previously attempted to cool the reactor by dropping water from helicopters, but those efforts appeared futile. On Saturday, fire trucks with high-pressure water cannons spewed ocean water into the plant's Unit 3 for hours.
Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has said the plant's backup power systems were improperly protects, leaving them vulnerable to the tsunami. A spokesman told reporters that the loss of the backup power systems, which were supposed to keep cooling systems online, was a "main cause" of the crisis.
A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns and runs the plants, said they would reconnect four of the plant's six reactors to the power grid on Saturday.
It is unclear whether the affected power systems would work once power is reconnected.
With files from The Associated Press
