Massive blast at Japan nuclear plant

Mangaloretoday News Network

Fukushima, March 12: Radiation leaked from an unstable Japanese nuclear reactor north of Tokyo on Saturday, the government said, after an explosion blew the roof off the facility in the wake of a massive earthquake.

The developments raised fears of a disastrous meltdown at the plant, which was damaged by Friday’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in Japan.

"We are looking into the cause and the situation and we’ll make that public when we have further information," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

Edano said an evacuation radius of 10 km (6 miles) from the stricken 40-year-old Daiichi 1 reactor plant in Fukushima prefecture was adequate. TV footage showed vapour rising from the plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.

The quake sent a 10-meter (33-foot) tsunami ripping through towns and cities across the northeast coast. Japanese media estimate that at least 1,300 people were killed.

The blast came as plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) worked desperately to reduce pressures in the core of the reactor.

"An unchecked rise in temperature could cause the core to essentially turn into a molten mass that could burn through the reactor vessel," risk information service Stratfor said in a report before the explosion. "This may lead to a release of an unchecked amount of radiation into the containment building that surrounds the reactor."

NHK television and Jiji said the outer structure of the building that houses the reactor appeared to have blown off, which could suggest the containment building had already been breached.

Earlier, the operator released what it said was a tiny amount of radioactive steam to reduce the pressure and the danger was minimal because tens of thousands of people had already been evacuated from the vicinity.

Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said the earth’s axis shifted 25 cm as a result of the quake and the US Geological Survey said the main island of Japan had shifted 2.4 meters.

Rescue operation on

Meanwhile, Japan launched a massive, military-led rescue operation after a giant quake and tsunami killed hundreds of people and turned the northeastern coast into a swampy wasteland.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he is sending 50,000 troops for the rescue and recovery efforts following Friday’s 8.9-magnitude quake that unleashed one of the greatest disasters Japan has witnessed.

The official death toll stood at 413, while 784 people were missing and 1,128 injured. Media reports say the toll it is at least 1,600. In addition, police said between 200 and 300 bodies were found along the coast in Sendai, the biggest city in the area near the quake’s epicentre. An untold number of bodies were also believed to be lying in the rubble and debris. Rescue workers had yet to reach the hardest-hit areas.

Devastation

The atomic emergency came as the country struggled to assess the full extent of the devastation wreaked by the massive tsunami, which was unleashed by the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan off the eastern coast.

More than 215,000 people were living in 1,350 temporary shelters in five prefectures, or states, the national police agency said. Since the quake, more than one million households have not had water, mostly concentrated in northeast.

Sendai, Japan 12:  Radiation measurements at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were 1,000 times higher than normal after the massive earthquake in northern Japan, the Kyodo news agency reported early Saturday, citing Japan’s nuclear safety agency.

There were concerns that radioactive steam may have escaped the plant due to high pressure inside an overheating reactor. The earthquake damaged power and water supplies and disrupted the reactor’s cooling systems.

A nuclear power plant affected by a massive earthquake is facing a possible meltdown, an official with Japan’s nuclear safety commission said on Saturday.

 

 

 

 

Ryohei Shiomi said that officials were checking whether a meltdown had taken place at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant’s Unit 1, which had lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday’s powerful earthquake.

Shiomi said that even if there was a meltdown, it wouldn’t affect humans beyond a six-mile (10-kilometer) radius.

Most of the 51,000 residents living within that radius have been evacuated, he said.


Earlier Saturday, Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability.

Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s Unit 1 scrambled to tamp down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9-magnitude quake and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system.

Some 3,000 people within two miles (three kilometers) of the plant were urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 6 miles (10 kilometers) after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1’s control room.

The government declared a state of emergency at the Daiichi unit -- the first at a nuclear plant in Japan’s history. But hours later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the six-reactor Daiichi site in northeastern Japan, announced that it had lost cooling ability at a second reactor there and three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site.

The government quickly declared states of emergency for those units, too.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the situation was most dire at Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit 1, where pressure had risen to twice what is consider the normal level. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kept cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by tsunami flooding.