TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Friday addressed his nation to say that although disaster relief continues three weeks after the “Great East Japan Earthquake,” the government will now begin focusing on reconstruction, building a “bright and promising future.”
Even as he spoke, U.S. and Japanese military troops and rescue workers joined forces to launch an intensive three-day search for the missing, whose numbers still exceed 16,000.
The operation involved at least 25,000 rescuers, 120 airplanes and 65 ships. They are combing marshes along coastlines where the giant waves washed away whole towns and villages, and teams of divers are fanning out into the ocean. A total of 32 bodies were recovered Friday, according to the Kyodo news service.
Kan planned to go to the disaster zone today, to visit shelters and a staging area inside the evacuation zone for emergency workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Engineers and firefighters are working in dangerous conditions to try to stabilize the plant.
The area around the site remains volatile as highly radioactive water continues to leak from at least one reactor. On Friday, plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported the contamination levels in the groundwater outside the Unit 1 reactor far exceeded the legal limit, adding the area to a growing list of high-risk hot spots on the site.
In Washington, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that roughly 70 percent of the core of one reactor at the plant had sustained severe damage, The New York Times reported. His assessment of the damage to reactor No. 1 was the most specific yet from a U.S. official on how close the plant came to a full meltdown after the earthquake and tsunami March 11.
Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, suggested that the worst moments of the crisis appeared to be receding, saying that the best information from the Japanese authorities indicated that water was once again covering the cores of the stricken reactors and the pools of spent fuel.
