Water at nuclear plant found 100,000 times normal on Sunday

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/world/asia/28japan.html?src=twrhp
TOKYO — Japan’s troubled effort to contain the nuclear contamination crisis at its stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant suffered a setback on Sunday when alarmingly high radiation levels were discovered in a flooded area inside the complex, raising new questions about how and when cleanup workers could resume their tasks.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator, said the elevated radiation levels in the water, which had flooded the turbine buildings adjacent to the reactors at the plant, were at least four times the permissible exposure levels for workers at the plant and 100,000 times more than water ordinarily found at a nuclear facility.
That could mean crews seeking to determine damage and fix the problems at the plant, hit by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and a tsunami more than two weeks ago, may not be able to even approach the most troubled parts of the complex until the water can be safely removed.
Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University, said that at the sharply elevated levels of radiation, workers would be able to remain on the site for only about 15 minutes before health considerations required them to leave. That could hamper their efforts to restore power at the reactors, compromising attempts to bring the crisis under control. end quote

If the reactor(s) that need working on is 100,000 time normal and any one or group of workers can spend (in total) only 15 minutes there. By the time they figure out what they want to do it's time to leave and nothing at all will tend to get done. We may be at the (Robots only) stage of doing things.

Begin next quote from same article:

Late Saturday, a worker trying to measure radiation levels of the water at another reactor, No. 2, saw the reading on his dosimeter jump beyond 1,000 millisieverts per hour, the highest reading so far. The worker left the scene immediately, said Takeo Iwamoto, a spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power. end quote.

By the way it just happens that 1,000 millisieverts is known to be a fatal dose of radiation. So, spending an hour there is tantamount to death(at least according to U.S. Nuclear officials.)