Plutonium

Plutonium

Tokyo Electric Power Co has said that it was not clear where the plutonium has come from but that the levels of plutonium 238, 239 and 240 were not in concentrations that are dangerous to human health.
He added that emergency teams trying to bring the four damaged reactors under control were still working.
"I apologise for making people worried," Sakae Muto, vice president of the company, said at a press conference in Tokyo.
"It is not at levels that are harmful to human health."
As well as being used in nuclear reactors, plutonium 239 is used in the production of nuclear weapons and has a half-life of more than 24,000 years.
Experts fear the plutonium may have come from spent fuel rods that were stored in pools at the plant. The March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the pools and exposed the rods, which rapidly surpassed safe temperature levels. Alternatively, the plutonium may be leaking from reactor No. 3, the only one at the plant that uses the element.
The Japanese government has already confirmed that levels of radioactivity in water seeping from the plant are 100,000 times normal levels. Elevated levels of radioactivity have already been found in the ocean close to the facility and in vegetables in prefectures surrounding the plant.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has vowed to increase monitoring in the plant and beyond the 12-mile exclusion zone imposed by the government around the nuclear facility.
And while it remains unclear just how serious this latest discovery is, NISA officials have stated that the detection of plutonium at the site indicates there has been "certain damage to fuel rods."
Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the agency, told Kyodo News that it is "deplorable" that accident safeguards at the plant had failed so dramatically.
Traces of radioactivity from the stricken plant have been found in rain that has fallen in the northeast United States, although authorities there have been quick to point out that the levels are "very low," as well as across large swathes of southeastern China and in South Korea.
In northern Japan, which bore the brunt of the earthquake and tsunami, the death toll has surpassed the 11,000 figure with a further 17,339 listed as missing.
According to police overseeing the recovery of the dead, more than 4,000 bodies found in the shattered remains of towns and villages along the north-east coast have still to be identified.
Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Plutonium