Radioactive leaks could last months

As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the Unied States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.

As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the Unied States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.

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The emergency flooding of two stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.

But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed — suggesting widening environmental contamination.

In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate.