Apocalypse : Japan Nuclear Situation ‘Out Of Control’

Mtoday News / Mail

Japan, March 16: ’They’ve lost control’: French claim Japan is hiding full scale of disaster as teams move back in to tackle nuclear meltdown as TWO more reactors heat up.

 

    * Workers battling nuclear meltdown briefly evacuated today after radiation levels increased
    * French minister: ’Let’s not beat about the bush, they’ve essentially lost control’
    * Officials comandeer police water cannon to spray complex
    * Attempts to dump water on reactors by helicopter fail
    * Concern at radioactive steam leaking from reactor number three
    * Two more previously stable reactors begin to heat up

 

Japan’s stricken nuclear power plant was abandoned for hours today, as soaring radiation forced emergency workers to flee for their lives and authorities were reduced to spraying reactors with police water cannons.

All 50 emergency workers who had been fighting to keep overheating reactors cool were this morning pulled back 500 yards from the complex as radiation levels became too dangerous.

And in an extraordinary attack, the French government accused the Japanese of losing control of the situation and hiding the full scale of the disaster.

Military helicopters made a failed attempt to drop water on the reactors from above, amid desperate efforts to cool nuclear fuel. Police water cannons usually used in riot control were even requested to spray the site.

 

 

’Out of control’: This dramatic pictures shows radioactive steam pouring from the Fukushima reactor number three  after it was damaged in an explosion 

 

The emergency teams had been pumping sea water into reactors using fire engines, but those efforts are thought to have stopped as the workers were pulled out. But Japanese officials said 180 workers were now back on the site.

Fears of ’an apocalypse’ were raised by European officials as radiation levels soared. In another attack, French Industry Minister Eric Besson said: ’Let’s not beat about the bush. They have visibly lost the essential of control (of the situation). That is our analysis, in any case, it’s not what they are saying.’

In a sign of mounting panic, Cabinet Secretary Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has already warned that the long-range cooling efforts may not work.

He said: ’It’s not so simple that everything will be resolved by pouring in water. We are trying to avoid creating other problems.’ 

 

 

Nuclear experts said the solutions being proposed to quell radiation leaks at the complex were last-ditch efforts to stem what could well be remembered as one of the world’s worst industrial disasters.  

’This is a slow-moving nightmare,’ said Dr Thomas Neff, a physicist and uranium-industry analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

The biggest concerns centre around the four over-heating reactors, and in particular radioactive steam pouring out of the plutonium-fuelled reactor number three which exploded on Monday.

Plutonium is far more hazardous to health than uranium, which is used to power the other five reactors on the site.  

There has been damage to four reactors at the Fukushima , three of which were damaged in explosions and another suffered a fire.

Reactor number four is the second highest concern after a nuclear fuel storage pond was exposed to the atmosphere after a fire.

A fifth and six reactor, which were previously unharmed, were today being sprayed with water amid reports that they too were heating up.

An official from the pant operator said today: ’The situation at the No.4 reactor is not exactly a good situation but the No.3 reactor is a higher priority.

More than 140,000 residents within 19 miles of the plant have been ordered to stay indoors - in addition to the 180,000 already evacuated from the immediate area. Terrified families clogged roads as they tried to flee.

And The French government urged its nationals living in Tokyo to leave the country or head to southern Japan due to the risk of radiation from an earthquake-crippled nuclear power plant to the north of the capital.

The French embassy in Tokyo said in a statement that its advisory applied with immediate effect to those French nationals who were not obliged to remain in the city. It added that it had asked Air France to mobilise planes currently in Asia to evacuate French citizens, and two were already on their way.

On Tuesday, a fire broke out in the same reactor’s fuel storage pond - an area where used nuclear fuel is kept cool - causing radioactivity to be released into the atmosphere. TEPCO said the new blaze erupted because the initial fire had not been fully extinguished.

 

 

Testing: Workers in protective white suits screen worried evacuees at a radiation contamination centre.

 

The turn of events caused European energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger to warn that Tokyo had almost lost control of events. ‘There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen,’ he told the European Parliament.

But just before 4am this morning the Japanese government said that the fire which had raged for around seven hours had been brought under control.

The Japanese government later ordered emergency workers to withdraw from its stricken nuclear power complex today amid a surge in radiation.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the workers, who have been dousing the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant with seawater in a frantic effort to stabilise their temperatures, had no choice but to pull back from the most dangerous areas.

The alarm spread worldwide. In Europe, some 500 bone marrow transplant centres were put on standby to treat any victims from Japan. And in India, officials demanded that imported Japanese goods be screened for radiation contamination.

The plant was yesterday rocked by a fire and two more explosions - bringing the total to four. One damaged the concrete and steel walls protecting reactor 2 – as concerns grew that the casing could split and potentially send out a cloud of dangerous radiation.

Aftershocks continue to hit the country, and a 6.0 magnitude tremor struck in the Pacific just off Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo, today, raising concerns that further damage would be caused to the already-weakened container walls of four reactors at the Fukushima plant.

Hajimi Motujuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), said the outer housing of the containment vessel at the No 4 unit at the complex caught fire.