TOKYO Japan has asked nuclear superpower Russia to send a special radiation treatment ship used to decommission nuclear submarines as it fights to contain the world's worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl, Japanese media said late on Monday. 
 
 Japanese engineers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been forced to release radioactive waste water into the sea. At the same time they are resorting to desperate measures to contain the damage, such as using bath salts to try to locate the source of leaks at the crippled complex 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo. 
 
 Three weeks after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami hit northeast Japan, sending some of Daiichi's reactors into partial meltdown, engineers are no closer to regaining control of the power plant or stopping radioactive leaks. 
 
 The quake and tsunami left nearly 28,000 people dead or missing and Japan's northeast coast a wreck. 
 
 The world's costliest natural disaster has caused power blackouts and cuts to supply chains and business hours. It is threatening economic growth and the yen, while a recent opinion poll suggested voters want embattled Prime Minister Naoto Kan to form a coalition in order to steer Japan through its worst crisis since World War Two. 
 
 Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) was forced on Monday to release low-level radioactive seawater that had been used to cool overheated fuel rods after it ran out of storage capacity for more highly contaminated water. 
 
 A TEPCO official was in tears as he told a news conference: "We are very sorry for this region and those involved." 
 
 The water, which is being released to free storage capacity for more highly contaminated water, is about 100 times more radioactive than legal limits. Koichi Nakamura, a deputy director-general of Japan's Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), told a news conference in Vienna about 11,500 metric tons of water would have to be discharged. 
 
 He also said Japan had not ruled out expanding the 20-km evacuation zone around the site. 
 
 Engineers planned to build two giant "silt curtains" made of polyester fabric in the sea to hinder the spread of more contamination from the plant. 
 
 Japan has also asked Russia for the "Suzuran", a ship which treats radioactive liquids, Kyodo and Jiji news agencies said. 
 
 The ship, a joint venture between Japan and Russia, was designed to help decommission nuclear submarines in Russia's Pacific fleet in Vladivostock, ensuring radioactive waste was not dumped into the Sea of Japan, Kyodo said. 
 
 It could take months to stem the leaks and longer to regain control of the power station, damaged by the March quake and tsunami, though a U.S. official in Vienna said there was no evidence the spent fuel in the reactors was restarting a nuclear reaction after being shut down. 
 
 DISASTER MAY SEE YEN WEAKEN 
 
 Japan, the world's third largest economy but also one of its most indebted nations, has estimated the damages bill may top $300 billion. 
 
 "The damage from the nuclear crisis and the subsequent power shortage will last for several years," said Eiji Hirano, former assistant governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ). 
 
 "There's a strong chance Japan's economy will contract in the current fiscal year," he told Reuters in an interview. 
 
 A former senior finance ministry official, Eisuke Sakakibara, said the yen would weaken in the coming months, possibly beyond 90 to the dollar, underlining expectations a near four-year rally in the currency may be over. 
 
 The yen traded at 84.05 per dollar early on Tuesday. 
 
 The disaster initially saw the yen soar on speculation Japanese would repatriate funds for reconstruction, prompting the G7 intervention to knock it back. 
 
 "This atomic power issue is an incident which would result in depreciation of the exchange rate," Sakakibara told reporters in Tokyo. 
 
 Unpopular and under pressure to quit or call a snap poll before the disaster, Prime Minister Kan has been criticised for his management of the disaster. 
 
 One newspaper poll said nearly two-thirds of voters wanted the government to form a coalition with the major opposition party and work together to recover from the disaster. 
 
 BATH SALTS, SEA CURTAIN 
 
 In their desperation to stop radioactive leaks, TEPCO engineers have used anything at hand. They have mixed sawdust and newspapers with polymers and cement in an unsuccessful attempt to seal a crack in a concrete pit at reactor No.2. 
 
 On Monday, they resorted to powdered bath salts to produce a milky color in water to help trace the source of the leak. 
 
 TEPCO said it was also planning to drape a curtain into the sea off the nuclear plant to try to prevent radioactive silt drifting out into the ocean. 
 
 The exact source of the radiation leaks remains unknown. NISA is investigating a damaged embankment near a sluice gate at the No.2 reactor and the possibility it may be seeping through a layer of small stones below a concrete pipe. 
 
 TEPCO said it would build tanks to hold contaminated seawater, was towing a floating tank which will arrive next week, and was negotiating the purchase of three more. 
 
 "If the current situation continues for a long time, accumulating more radioactive substances, it will have a huge impact on the ocean," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. 
 
 Small levels of radiation from the plant have been detected as far away as Europe and the United States and several countries have banned milk and produce from the vicinity. 
 
 Singapore extended a ban on Japanese food imports on Monday after detecting radiation in more fruit and vegetable imports. Kan asked the European Union on Monday for a calm response to Japanese imports. The EU has urged radiation testing of Japanese food and feed imports. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Yoko Nishikawa, Yoko Kubota, Linda Sieg, Leika Kihara, Tetsushi Kajimoto in Tokyo and Sylvia Westall in Vienna; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Daniel Magnowski) ||||| Early Monday, workers injected a dye into a separate tunnel where contaminated water had been discovered, to determine whether that was the source of the water in the pit, said Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant’s operator. Workers are also expected to continue efforts Monday to stop the leakage from the pit into the ocean. 
 
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 Experts estimate that about seven tons an hour of radioactive water is escaping the pit. Safety officials have said that the water, which appears to be coming from the damaged No. 2 reactor, contains one million becquerels per liter of iodine 131, or about 10,000 times the levels normally found in water at a nuclear plant. 
 
 “There is still a steady stream of water from the pit,” Mr. Nishiyama said, but workers would continue to “observe and evaluate” the situation overnight. 
 
 The leak underscores the dangerous side effects of the strategy to cool the plant’s reactors and spent fuel storage pools by pumping them with hundreds of tons of water. While much of that water evaporates, a significant portion also turns into dangerous runoff that has been discovered in various parts of the plant, endangering workers at the plant and hindering repair efforts. On March 24, three workers were injured when they stepped into a pool of radioactive water in one of the plant’s turbine buildings. 
 
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 In recent days, workers have tried to clear the contaminated pools, but have struggled to find places to store the water. Meanwhile, levels of iodine 131 that are over 4,000 times normal, as well as levels of cesium 137 that are 527 times normal have been detected in seawater taken 1,080 feet away from the plant, raising fears of damage to sea life. 
 
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 Tokyo Electric has said it has little choice but to pump more water into the reactors at the moment, since the normal cooling systems at the plant are inoperable and more radioactive material would be released if the reactors were allowed to melt down fully or if the rods caught fire. 
 
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 Still, some experts expressed bewilderment at what they called an 11th-hour bid to plug the leak. 
 
 “I’ve never heard of anything like it at a nuclear power plant,” said Itsuro Kimura, emeritus professor at Kyoto University and director of the Japan-based Institute of Nuclear Technology. What is really needed, he said, is for the cooling systems to come back online at the plant’s six reactors. Those cooling systems work by circulating water around the nuclear fuel, producing little runoff. 
 
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 “That is the best way to stop the leakage of radioactive water,” Mr. Kimura said. “But for now, they have to stop the water leaking the best they can.” 
 
 Tokyo Electric has come under growing scrutiny for its handling of the nuclear crisis set off by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. In recent days, reports surfaced that the company would be taken over by the government. Tokyo Electric reported that a protesters’ sound truck, presumably sent to heckle the company, was blocked from entering the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Thursday. 
 
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 There are also frequent protests at the company’s headquarters in the Uchisaiwai-cho neighborhood of central Tokyo. On Sunday, several hundred antinuclear protesters assembled in front of Tokyo Electric’s offices, then marched to Kasumigaseki to protest in front of the offices of Japan’s nuclear regulators. 
 
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 The protesters shouted such slogans as, “Tokyo Electric, get out of nuclear energy” and “Compensate the victims.” Others called for the company and government to apologize. Some carried placards that read, “Even if we don’t have nuclear power, we’ll still have electricity.” 
 
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 “The Japanese people don’t protest usually, but this time, we have to show that we can call for change,” said Masanobu Takeshi, 40, who was there with his wife and son. 
 
 Makoto Yanagida, 70, who has been protesting since March 12, said that on the first day, only about 10 people showed up. Sunday’s protest, the 10th, drew more than 300 people, he said. Mr. Yanagida said that he would continue protesting until nuclear plants were shut down. 
 
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 Nuclear officials warned that it could take months to bring the Fukushima Daiichi plant under control. “It would take a few months until we finally get things under control and have a better idea about the future,” said Mr. Nishiyama of the nuclear safety agency. “We’ll face a crucial turning point within the next few months, but that is not the end.” 
 
 Earlier Sunday, Tokyo Electric said that two workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant who were missing since the day of the earthquake and tsunami had been confirmed dead. Five employees of subsidiary companies have died at other Tokyo Electric facilities. 
 
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 Tokyo Electric said the two workers at Fukushima Daiichi were found in the basement of the turbine building connected to the No. 4 reactor. The company found the bodies on Wednesday but did not release the details until the families had been notified. 
 
 The company said that the workers, Kazuhiro Kokubo, 24, and Yoshiki Terashima, 21, died on March 11, around 4 p.m., after the tsunami hit the plant. 
 
 “It pains me that these two young workers were trying to protect the power plant,” Tokyo Electric’s chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, said in a statement. 
 
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 Of the other five deaths, one man died when he was struck by a crane that had toppled at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant, and four workers died at Tokyo Electric’s Hitachinaka coal-fired power plant when they fell from the chimneys they were working on.
– Desperate workers continued to stuff sawdust and newspapers mixed with resin and concrete into a major fissure at a Fukushima nuclear reactor as the breach threatened to continue pumping radioactive water into the ocean from months to come. Meanwhile, workers used powdered bath salts to turn the water a milky color, to trace the exact location of the worst of the leak, reports Reuters. Early reports today indicate the efforts are not working, reports the New York Times. Some seven tons an hour of radioactive water are escaping from the pit where the 6-foot crack was discovered Saturday. The pit is next to the seawater intake valves of the No. 2 reactor at Fukushima. If efforts to plug the leak continue to fail, officials said they would try to hang some sort of curtain in the ocean, to prevent the radioactive water from spreading. The radioactive water "will have a huge impact on the ocean," warned the government's chief cabinet secretary, and officials fear the problem could continue for "several" months. "We need to stop the spread into the ocean as soon as possible. With that strong determination, we are asking Tokyo Electric Power Co to act quickly," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference.