Fukushima nuclear plant lost power due to ... mouse

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said a mouse may have caused a power outage at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant earlier this week.

The power failure occurred at the Fukushima nuclear power plant on Monday (March 18), causing a total power outage of the cooling system of four storage tanks for nuclear fuel at No.1 reactors. , 3 and 4. However, the cooling system of these reactors is not affected.

Dead mouse corpses are detected in the electrical box at the fuel tank cooling system.

Power company Tepco said it had found a fire and a 15cm-long mouse was discovered inside the main electrical box of the cooling system. They suspect a mouse may have short-circuited in the electrical box, causing the entire system to lose power.

The engineers took 30 hours to fix the problem. The whole cooling system was back on the morning of March 20. The cooling water system contains nuclear fuel bars after use, but they still have very high levels of radioactivity.

'We are very worried about the incident that may affect people, but the system has been restored and is operating stably,' said power company spokesman Masayuki Ono.

This is the first power outage at the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the plant was re-controlled in December 2011. Two years ago, the double disaster earthquake and tsunami leaked radiation from the Fukushima nuclear machine.

The Japanese government believes that the reactors at Fukushima nuclear power plant are in a state of cooling and there is no high level of radioactivity.