The Fukushima No. 1 power plant of Tokyo Electric Power Co.
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Japan battles nuclear emergency after deadly quake
Kelly Macnamara
March 14, 2011 - 7:54AM
Japan battled a feared meltdown of two reactors at a quake-hit nuclear plant Sunday, as the full horror began emerging of the disaster on the ravaged northeast coast where more than 10,000 were feared dead.
An explosion at the ageing Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant blew apart the building housing one of its reactors Saturday, a day after the biggest quake ever recorded in Japan unleashed a monster tsunami.
The atomic emergency escalated Sunday as crews struggled to prevent overheating at a second reactor where the cooling system has also failed, and the government warned that it too could suffer a blast.
Advertisement: Story continues below Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the situation at the stricken power plant remained grave, and that Japan was facing its worst crisis since the end of World War II -- which left the defeated country in ruins.
"The current situation of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear plants is in a way the most severe crisis in the 65 years since World War II," Kan said in a televised national address.
"Whether we Japanese can overcome this crisis depends on each of us," said the premier, who was wearing an emergency services suit.
Kan said the shutdown of reactors across the quake zone would entail rolling power outages nationwide, and urged citizens to conserve energy. Japan's nuclear industry provides about a third of its power needs.
Top government spokesman Yukio Edano said it was highly likely that a partial meltdown had occurred at the plant's number one reactor, and a second was possible at the plant 250 kilometres (160 miles) northeast of Tokyo.
"There is the possibility of an explosion in the number three reactor," he said, while voicing confidence that it would withstand the blast as the first reactor had the day before.
A meltdown occurs when a reactor core overheats and causes damage to the facility, potentially unleashing radiation into the environment.
Edano said that some radiation had escaped in the accident, but that the levels released into the air were so far not high enough to affect human health.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power later said that despite continuing efforts, it had not managed to ensure the tops of the fuel rods in the two troubled reactors remained submerged. Exposed rods are an indication of a possible meltdown.
A cooling pump at another plant 120 kilometres from Tokyo, the Tokai No. 2, had failed, but a back-up was working and cooling the reactor, a plant spokesman said early Monday.
The United Nations said a total of 590,000 people had been evacuated in the quake and tsunami disaster, including 210,000 living near the Fukushima nuclear plants.
The colossal 8.9 magnitude tremor sent waves of churning mud and debris racing over towns and farmland in Japan's northeast, destroying everything in its path and reducing swathes of countryside to a swampy wasteland.
The immense force of the quake moved Honshu -- the main Japanese island -- 2.4 metres (eight feet), the US Geological Survey said.
In the small port town of Minamisanriku alone some 10,000 people were unaccounted for -- more than half the population of the town, which was practically erased, public broadcaster NHK reported.
The police chief in Miyagi prefecture -- where Minamisanriku is situated -- said the death toll was certain to exceed 10,000 in his region.
The national police agency said the confirmed death toll now stood at 1,597.
But in a rare piece of good news, a man who was swept 15 kilometres out to sea along with his house by the tsunami was plucked to safety Sunday after being spotted clinging to a piece of the roof.
Hiromitsu Shinkawa, 60, was discovered by a Japanese destroyer and transported by helicopter to hospital, where he was in surprisingly good health after his miracle rescue.
But as the world's third-largest economy struggled to assess the full extent of the disaster, groups of hundreds of bodies were being found along the shattered coastline.
In the city of Fukushima, about 80 kilometres northwest of the stricken nuclear plant, people were panic-buying at supermarkets and petrol stations had run dry.
Otomo Miki was with her husband, three children and their 82-year-old grandfather when the quake hit their home of Sendai. They managed to get to their car and speed to safety before the tsunami roared through.
"I had to keep zig-zagging around people and water to get to safety," she said. "We've lost our house and we have no idea what's going to happen next."
Her older sister was in a bus when the wave some 10 metres high crashed through.
"The bus driver told everybody to get out of the bus and run," Miki said. "My sister got out but some people just couldn't run fast enough," she said, adding that they were swept away in the waves.
The sheer power of the water tossed cars as if they were small toys, upturned lorries that now litter the roads, and left shipping containers piled up along the shore.
Many survivors were left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food, as authorities appeared overwhelmed by the monumental scale of the disaster.
With ports, airports, highways and manufacturing plants shut down, the government predicted "considerable impact on a wide range of our country's economic activities".
Leading risk analysis firm AIR Worldwide said the quake alone would exact an economic toll estimated at between $14.5 billion and $34.6 billion (10 billion to 25 billion euros), without taking into account the effects of the tsunami.
Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei index is expected to tumble on Monday, with the benchmark index possibly breaking the psychologically important 10,000 level.
The Bank of Japan plans to pump "massive" funds into markets in a bid to help them stabilise following the quake, Dow Jones Newswires said.
Japan committed 100,000 troops -- about 40 percent of the armed forces -- to spearhead a mammoth rescue and recovery effort with hundreds of ships, aircraft and vehicles headed to the Pacific coast area.
"There are so many people who are still isolated and waiting for assistance. This reality is very stark," said Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa.
The world rallied behind the disaster-stricken nation, with offers of help even from Japan's traditional rival China.
The US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan reached waters off the northeast coast Sunday, part of a flotilla sent by Japan's close ally which has nearly 50,000 military personnel in the country. US Navy helicopters were transporting relief supplies for quake and tsunami survivors.
Pope Benedict XVI hailed the "courageous" Japanese people and called for prayers for the victims.
Japan sits on the "Pacific Ring of Fire", and Tokyo is in one of its most dangerous areas, where three continental plates are slowly grinding against each other, building up enormous seismic pressure.
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Japan battles nuclear meltdown
By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo
Published: March 13 2011 21:58 Last updated: March 13 2011 21:58
Japan was fighting to contain a rapidly escalating nuclear emergency as concerns mounted over a partial meltdown at two reactors at a 40-year-old power plant north of Tokyo.
Naoto Kan, prime minister, said Japan was facing “its worst crisis since the second world war”, following last week’s earthquake and tsunami.
He sought to rally the nation as it became increasingly apparent that the death toll from the 8.9 magnitude offshore earthquake and the consequent devastating tsunami could ultimately be measured in the tens of thousands.
But Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, was insistent the situation was under control. “Even if it explodes, the reactor is built to withstand that level of force.”
To keep markets stable in the wake of the crisis, Masaaki Shirakawa, governor of the Bank of Japan, said on Sunday the central bank would provide huge amounts of liquidity today to the banking system. The BoJ is likely to provide Y2,000bn- Y3,000bn (£15.2bn-£22.8bn) in funds through its market operations – two to three times the normal amount – to soothe markets and keep short-term borrowing costs from spiking.
Over the weekend it provided Y55bn in funds to financial institutions in northern Japan.
On Sunday, authorities said there was a “significant chance” that fuel rods had partially melted in two of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility’s reactors, releasing radioactive material into the reactors’ containment vessels.
Some of the material would have escaped into the air when engineers vented steam to relieve pressure in the vessels.
Adding to problems at the Fukushima site, hydrogen from vented steam was detected in the No 3 reactor’s outer building, threatening an explosion similar to the one that blew apart the No 1 reactor building’s roof and walls on Saturday.
Engineers were pouring seawater into the facility’s No 1 and No 3 reactors, where water levels inside containment vessels remained dangerously low.
Olli Heinonen, former deputy head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Financial Times the Japanese authorities were “having tremendous trouble”.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist at Kobe University who has worked on state panels on nuclear safety, told Bloom-berg: “We’ve assumed that if the plants were well enough engineered, everything would be OK, but it’s not turned out to be true. Atomic power has been central to national policy and, in Japan, once you’ve committed, it’s hard to reverse course.”
It remained unclear how much radiation had escaped from the power station at Fukushima, or how far it had spread. Sensors at another nuclear complex 100km to the north picked up levels four times higher than the legal maximum, Japanese media reported.
The danger at the nuclear station compounded what was already a vast and deadly natural disaster. Police in Miyagi prefecture in the country’s north-east, one of the worst affected areas, said it was likely that at least 10,000 people had been killed in their district alone, mostly by drowning.
Neighbouring Iwate prefecture was similarly devastated, with whole coastal communities washed away by the tsunami.
The number of officially confirmed deaths nationally rose toward 2,000, but a government spokesman said this was expected to grow.
Before the earthquake, the Democratic Party of Japan had been struggling to pass bills related to the 2011 budget.
Yoshihiko Noda, finance minister, had appealed to opposition parties to co-operate in passing the budget for fiscal 2011, after which the government aims to pass an emergency supplementary budget to help rebuild the country.
He said the government had just Y200bn in reserve funds and, together with Mr Kan, called for a supplementary budget to help areas that had been severely affected.
Although the central bank is not expected to cut its policy rate, which it has cut to a historic low of zero, in order to combat deflation, it is likely to signal its readiness to ease monetary policy to ensure damage from the quake does not threaten the country’s fragile economic recovery.
Takahide Kiuchi, economist at Nomura, said the BoJ was likely to increase its asset-buying programme from about Y5,000bn to between Y8,000bn and Y10,000bn.
In an attempt to support economic activity, the BoJ has been buying assets, including real estate investment trusts.
On Sunday some 300,000 people were sheltering in schools, community centres and government buildings, and the largest military mobilisation since the war was under way as part of a desperate effort to locate survivors. Some 100,000 of the Japanese defence forces were mobilised.
About 1.5m households remained without power or water on Sunday evening.
Some 170,000 evacuees came from a 20km-radius zone being cleared around the plant and a 10km zone around a sister facility nearby, which was suffering less serious cooling problems.
Naoko Ando, who was caught up in the quake in Sendai, Miyagi’s main city, said she feared for her extended family who have been evacuated from their home in Futaba, a village close to the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant.
“We can’t get a hold of anyone in Fukushima. Mobiles and batteries are out, so we can’t connect. The only information we have is that they have been evacuated to a relative’s home...We’re so worried.”
TV footage from Fukushima’s surrounding towns showed rescue workers in white protective suits sweeping evacuees with radiation sensors, and as many as 160 people may have suffered radiation poisoning, nuclear safety officials said.
Engineers’ inability to cool the plant’s reactors more than 48 hours after the quake raised increasing safety concerns.
They were also considering pouring seawater into No.2 reactor.
At times more than half the roughly 4m-tall rods in the No. 1 reactor were exposed above the water’s surface, nuclear officials said. Aftershocks continued to be felt along the country’s Pacific coast and the Meteorological Agency said there was a 70 per cent chance that a quake with a magnitude of 7 or higher would occur in the next three days.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Sunday that a hydrogen explosion could occur at the complex’s Unit 3, the latest reactor to face a possible meltdown. That would follow a hydrogen blast Saturday in the plant’s Unit 1, where operators attempted to prevent a meltdown by injecting sea water into it.
‘At the risk of raising further public concern, we cannot rule out the possibility of an explosion,’ Edano said. ‘If there is an explosion, however, there would be no significant impact on human health.’
With a total of three nuclear power stations in the northeast offline, the government called on manufacturers to keep factories closed and shops to keep neon lights off to save power. Banri Kaeda, industry minister, warned of rolling blackouts in Tokyo and other areas.
foreign companies based in Tokyo said they were moving staff to cities further to the southwest, such as Osaka and Fukuoka, until the danger posed by the Fukushima plant could be fully assessed. The spouses and children of some expatriate workers in the capital were leaving the country or were preparing to do so.
Additional reporting by Lindsay Whipp in Rikuzentakata,Gwen Robinson in Tokyo and James Blitz in London.
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