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Tokyo Electric Power Co. will install the first cover at the No. 1 reactor, the focus of recent stabilization efforts.

Workers will erect a steel framework and place a giant polyester tent-like cover around the reactor building. The cover will be 55 meters high, 47 meters long and 42 meters wide.

The disclosure by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is the latest indication that the disaster was worse than previously disclosed, making it more difficult to stabilize the plant.

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Based on the amount of water that is remaining around the partially melted and collapsed fuel, Matsumoto estimated that the pressure vessel had developed a hole of several centimeters in diameter.

The finding makes it likely that at one point in the immediate wake of the disaster the 4-meter-high stack of uranium-rich rods at the core of the reactor had been entirely exposed to the air, he said. Boiling water reactors like those at Fukushima rely on water as both a coolant and a barrier to radiation.

U.S. nuclear experts said that the company may have to build a concrete wall around the unit because of the breach, and that this could now take years.

“If it is assumed the fuel did melt through the reactor, then the most likely solution is to encapsulate the entire unit. This may include constructing a concrete wall around the unit and building a protective cover over it,” W. Gene Corley, senior vice president of CTL Group in Skokie, Illinois, said on Thursday.

“Because of the high radiation that would be present if this has happened, the construction will take many months and may stretch into years,” Corley said.

TEPCO should consider digging a trench around reactors 1-3 all the way down to the bedrock, which is about 50 feet below the surface, said Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds Associates Inc of Burlington, Vermont, who once worked on reactors of similar design to the Fukushima plant.

He said this should be filled with zeolite, which can absorb radioactive cesium to stop more poisons from leaking into the groundwater around the plant.

“TEPCO seems to be going backwards in getting the situation under control and things may well be slowly eroding with all the units having problems,” said Tom Clements with Friends of the Earth, a U.S.-based environmental group.

Earlier this month, more than 70 participants of the Wheat Quality Council’s Hard Wheat Tour pegged the Kansas crop to total 256.7 million bushels, averaging about 37 bushels per acre.

That is well shy of last year’s 334 million bushel estimate, despite the fact that farmers planted 800,000 more acres of wheat last fall.

On May 11, Kansas Agriculture Statistics released its own forecast of the 2011 wheat crop.

It estimates farmers will grow 261.8 million bushels, down 27% from last year and the lowest production since 1996.

The update by Tokyo Electric Power Company came as the government announced a cull of thousands of cattle and other livestock now roaming the 20km evacuation zone around the Fukushima plant.

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TEPCO said yesterday that new measurements taken this week, after workers fixed gauges in the badly-hit reactor one building, indicated that water pumped into the pressure vessel had quickly leaked out.

The water level inside had fallen below the bottom of the 4m-long fuel rods, suggesting they had been exposed to the air, increasing the risk of a dangerous full meltdown.

However, the vessel’s relatively low outside temperature of 100C-120C indicated the rods had dropped to the bottom of the vessel and were under water there.

“The temperature of the pressure vessel was 100-120C, which is considered to be the level where the fuel rods are being cooled down in a relatively stable manner,” TEPCO said.

TEPCO has been injecting seven tonnes of water per hour into the reactor one pressure vessel and also plans to flood the wider containment vessel around it to cool down the entire system. The operations have created massive amounts of highly contaminated run-off water.

TEPCO has struggled to stop spills into the Pacific but reported another yesterday, saying water had leaked into the sea from a concrete pit near reactor three.

Samples of seawater taken near the plant contained caesium-134 at a concentration 18,000 times the permitted level, the utility said, adding that the spill had been stopped by filling the pit with concrete.

That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the United Nations.

The unanimous verdict, which he plans to appeal, ends an eight-week trial in what prosecutors call the largest hedge fund insider trading case in history.

Central to the prosecution’s evidence were tapped phone calls between Rajaratnam and corporate insiders.

The Metropolitan police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the US military, which shows an individual’s movements and communications with other people on a three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate information gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs.

This stealth provision was added to the bill by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), but has a bit of a history. It was first proposed by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008 after the Bush administration lost the Boumediene v. Bush case, in which the Supreme Court decided that federal courts would subject the administration’s asserted law of war basis to hold Guantanamo detainees to searching review. An idea that may have originally been intended to bolster the Bush administration’s basis for holding Guantanamo detainees is now being promoted as an authorization of a worldwide war — and could become the single biggest ceding of unchecked war authority to the executive branch in modern American history.

The current authorization of war provided the constitutional authority for the executive branch to go to war in Afghanistan. Subsequently, it has reportedly been invoked by the executive branch much more broadly to also use military force in Yemen and elsewhere, to justify torture and abuse of detainees, to eavesdrop and spy on American citizens without warrants, and to imprison people captured far from any battlefield without charge or trial.