Cable reaches Japan nuclear plant

New aerial footage of reactor damage

Engineers at Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant have managed to lay a cable to reactor 2, the UN's nuclear watchdog reports.

Restoring power should enable engineers to restart the pumps which send coolant over the reactor.

Workers at Fukushima have been battling to prevent fuel in the reactors from overheating since Friday's magnitude 9.0 quake and subsequent tsunami.

The confirmed death toll from the disaster has risen above 5,600.

More than 9,500 people are missing and tens of thousands of people are living in temporary shelters. For a while now it has appeared that delivering electrical power to Fukushima Daiichi power station offered the best hope of stabilising things.

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Provided that the station's electrical systems are intact and its pumps are still functional, it should become possible to pump water back into the fuel storage ponds in reactor buildings 3 and 4, and to improve the flow into the damaged reactors themselves.

But it is also possible that the earthquake, tsunami, fires and explosions have knocked out some of this equipment.

Provided power can be restored across the complex, it appears possible that Fukushima Daiichi could be back under control within a few days.

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US President Barack Obama has said he is confident the "strong, resilient" people of Japan will recover from the crisis and that the country will emerge stronger than before.

The atomic crisis was triggered when the power supply to Fukushima was damaged by the natural disaster and back-up generators failed.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which runs the plant, has been attempting to connect it to the main grid via a 1-km (0.6-mile) electricity cable.

Once power is restored, engineers should be able to re-activate the pumps which send coolant through the reactors and the pools where spent fuel rods are stored