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Operated via remote control, one of the truck-mounted pumps was already at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site and being used to spray water. Four more will be flown in from Germany and the United States, according to the German-manufacturer Putzmeister. The biggest of the five has an arm that extends well over 200 feet.

“Initially, they will probably pump water,” Putzmeister stated. “Later they will be used for any necessary concreting work.”

A construction company in Augusta, Ga., was among those redirecting the pumps to Japan. Its owner said he believes building a concrete sarcophagus will follow.

“Our understanding is they are preparing to go to next phase and it will require a lot of concrete,” Jerry Ashmore told the Augusta Chronicle.

He did not expect the pump to return. “It will be too hot to come back,” Ashmore said.

A cargo plane is expected to fly the truck and pump from Atlanta next week at a cost of $1.4 million.

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc said it canceled trades in 10 new ETFs sponsored by Scottrade affiliate FocusShares, some of which briefly plummeted as much as 98 percent.

Radioactive material was confirmed from groundwater for the first time since the March 11 quake and tsunami hit the nuclear power plant on the Pacific coast, knocking out the reactors’ key cooling functions. An official of the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said, ”We’re aware this is an extremely high figure.”

The contaminated groundwater was found from around the No. 1 reactor’s turbine building, although the radiation level of groundwater is usually so low that it cannot be measured.

Japanese authorities were also urged to consider taking action over radioactive contamination outside the 20-kilometer evacuation zone around the plant, as the International Atomic Energy Agency said readings from soil samples collected in the village of Iitate, about 40 km from the plant, exceeded its criteria for evacuation.

The authorities denied that the seawater and soil contamination posed an immediate threat to human health, but the government said it plans to enhance radiation data monitoring around the plant on the Pacific coast, about 220 km northeast of Tokyo.

According to the government’s nuclear safety agency, the radioactive iodine-131 at a concentration of 4,385 times the maximum level permitted under law has been detected in a seawater sample collected Wednesday afternoon near the plant, exceeding the previous high recorded the day before.

The records — 894 files in PDF form that must be individually opened and read — reveal for the first time the names of financial institutions that borrowed directly from the central bank through the so-called discount window. The Fed provided the documents after the U.S. Supreme Court this month rejected a banking industry group’s attempt to shield them from public view.

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The radiation guides called Protective Action Guides or PAGs are protocols for responding to radiological events ranging from nuclear power-plant accidents to dirty bombs.

Drinking water, for example, would have a huge increase in allowable public exposure to radioactivity, the group says, that would include:

A nearly 1000-fold increase in strontium-90

An almost 25,000 rise for nickel-63

The new radiation guidance would also allow long-term cleanup standards thousands of times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted, permitting doses to the public that EPA itself estimates would cause a cancer in as much as every fourth person exposed, the group says.

Khalifa Hifter was once a top military officer for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, but after a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s, Hifter switched to the anti-Gadhafi opposition. In the early 1990s, he moved to suburban Virginia, where he established a life but maintained ties to anti-Gadhafi groups.

Late last week, Hifter was appointed to lead the rebel army, which has been in chaos for weeks. He is the third such leader in less than a month, and rebels interviewed in Libya openly voiced distrust for the most recent leader, Abdel Fatah Younes, who had been at Gadhafi’s side until just a month ago.

At a news conference Thursday, the rebel’s military spokesman said Younes will stay as Hifter’s chief of staff, and added that the army — such as it is — would need “weeks” of training.

According to Abdel Salam Badr of Richmond, Va., who said he has known Hifter all his life — including back in Libya — Hifter — whose name is sometimes spelled Haftar, Hefter or Huftur — was motivated by his intense anti-Gadhafi feelings.

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The operatives are in Libya to gather intelligence to help direct NATO airstrikes and to help train inexperienced rebel fighters.

“The CIA team is there to train them how to shoot, how to fight, how to have military discipline,” NPR’s Deborah Amos reported from Cairo. “They are joining a team of former Libyan military officers who are now training about 30,000 young Libyans in the rebel stronghold to also improve discipline, improve communications and make it into a more coherent fighting force.”

The team’s deployment was authorized after President Obama signed what’s called a “finding,” a legal step necessary before the CIA can carry out secret operations, NPR’s Tom Bowman reported. The move puts the U.S. squarely on the side of the rebels.

Trained in personnel decontamination and monitoring of radiation levels, the team would not be involved in the efforts to stabilize the reactors at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Approximately 155 Marines from the Marines’ Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF) received their deployment orders for Japan earlier today and are scheduled to arrive on Friday.

The team is being sent as what a Defense Department official calls “an initial response force” because they are only a portion of the much larger CBIRF unit.

Based at the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland, CBIRF is a Marine unit specially trained to counter the effects of a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive (CBRNE) incident. Usually, that entails being available to assist local, state and federal agencies with domestic emergency responses to CBRNE incidents.

The unit’s deployment to Japan “will provide the U.S. on-scene commander a rapid response capability and, if requested, [allow the commander to] assist Japanese authorities by providing advice and expertise in the areas of agent detection and identification, casualty search, rescue, personnel decontamination and emergency medical care,” a defense official said.