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Explosion at Japan nuke plant, disaster toll rises

IWAKI, Japan - An explosion at a nuclear power station on Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor amid fears that it could melt down after being hit by a powerful earthquake and tsunami.

Large amounts of radiation were spewing out and the evacuation area around the plant was expanded but officials did not know how dangerous the leak was to people. Shinji Kinjo, a spokesman for the Japanese nuclear agency, could not say how much radiation was in the atmosphere or how hot the reactor was following the failure of its cooling system.

Friday’s double disaster, which pulverized Japan’s northeastern coast, has left 574 people dead by official count, although local media reports said at least 1,300 people may have been killed.

Tokyo Power Electric Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, said four workers had suffered fractures and bruises and were being treated at a hospital. A nuclear expert said a meltdown may not pose widespread danger.

Footage on Japanese TV showed that the walls of the reactor’s building had crumbled, leaving only a skeletal metal frame standing. Puffs of smoke were spewing out of the plant in Fukushima, 20 miles (30 kilometers) from Iwaki.

‘We are now trying to analyze what is behind the explosion,’ said government spokesman Yukio Edano, stressing that people should quickly evacuate a six-mile (10-kilometer) radius. ‘We ask everyone to take action to secure safety.’

The trouble began at the plant’s Unit 1 after the massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it spawned knocked out power there. According to official figures, 586 people are missing and 1,105 injured. 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.

The true scale of the destruction was still not known more than 24 hours after the quake since washed-out roads and shut airports have hindered access to the area. An untold number of bodies were believed to be buried in the rubble and debris.

In another disturbing development that could substantially raise the death toll, Kyodo news agency said rail operators lost contact with four trains running on coastal lines on Friday and still had not found them by Saturday afternoon.

East Japan Railway Co. said it did not know how many people were aboard the trains.

Adding to worries was the fate of nuclear power plants. Japan has declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability.

The most troubled one, Fukushima Dai-ichi, is facing meltdown, officials have said.

A ‘meltdown’ is not a technical term. Rather, it is an informal way of referring to a very serious collapse of a power plant’s systems and its ability to manage temperatures. It is not immediately clear if a meltdown would cause serious radiation risk, and if it did how far the risk would extend.

Yaroslov Shtrombakh, a Russian nuclear expert, said a Chernobyl-style meltdown was unlikely.

‘It’s not a fast reaction like at Chernobyl,’ he said. ‘I think that everything will be contained within the grounds, and there will be no big catastrophe.’

In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded and caught fire, sending a cloud of radiation over much of Europe.

Pressure has been building up in Fukushima reactor — it’s now twice the normal level — and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters Saturday that the plant was venting ‘radioactive vapors.’ Officials said they were measuring radiation levels in the area. Wind in the region is weak and headed northeast, out to sea, according to the Meteorological Agency.

The reactor in trouble has already leaked some radiation: Before the explosion, operators had detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1’s control room.

Also before the blast, Ryohei Shiomi, a nuclear official, said that each hour the plant was releasing the amount of radiation a person normally absorbs in a year.

The evacuation area around the plant was expanded to a radius of 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the six miles (10 kilometers) before. People in the expanded area were advised to leave quickly; 51,000 residents were previously evacuated.

‘Everyone wants to get out of the town. But the roads are terrible,’ said Reiko Takagi, a middle-aged woman, standing outside a taxi company. ‘It is too dangerous to go anywhere. But we are afraid that winds may change and bring radiation toward us.’

Meanwhile, the first wave of military rescuers began arriving by boats and helicopters.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said 50,000 troops would join rescue and recovery efforts following the quake that unleashed one of the greatest disasters Japan has witnessed — a 23-foot (7-meter) tsunami that washed far inland over fields, smashing towns, airports and highways in its way.

‘Most of houses along the coastline were washed away, and fire broke out there,’ said Kan after inspecting the quake area in a helicopter. ‘I realized the extremely serious damage the tsunami caused.’

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 1 million households have not had water, mostly concentrated in northeast.

The transport ministry said all highways from Tokyo leading to quake-hit areas were closed, except for emergency vehicles. Mobile communications were spotty and calls to the devastated areas were going unanswered .

Local TV stations broadcast footage of people lining up for water and food such as rice balls. In Fukushima, city officials were handing out bottled drinks, snacks and blankets. But there were large areas that were surrounded by water and were unreachable.

One hospital in Miyagi prefecture was seen surrounded by water. The staff had painted an SOS on its rooftop and were waving white flags.

Kan said a total of 190 military aircraft and 25 ships have been sent to the area, which continued to be jolted by tremors, even 24 hours later.

More than 125 aftershocks have occurred, many of them above magnitude 6.0, which alone would be considered strong.

Technologically advanced Japan is well prepared for quakes and its buildings can withstand strong jolts, even a temblor like Friday’s, which was the strongest the country has experienced since official records started in the late 1800s. What was beyond human control was the killer tsunami that followed.

It swept inland about six miles (10 kilometers) in some areas, swallowing boats, homes, cars, trees and everything else.

‘The tsunami was unbelievably fast,’ said Koichi Takairin, a 34-year-old truck driver who was inside his sturdy four-ton rig when the wave hit the port town of Sendai.

‘Smaller cars were being swept around me,’ he said. All I could do was sit in my truck.’

His rig ruined, he joined the steady flow of survivors who walked along the road away from the sea and back into the city on Saturday. Smoke from at least one large fire could be seen in the distance.

Smashed cars and small airplanes were jumbled up against buildings near the local airport, several miles (kilometers) from the shore. Felled trees and wooden debris lay everywhere as rescue workers coasted on boats through murky waters around flooded structures, nosing their way through a sea of debris.

Basic commodities were at a premium. Hundreds lined up outside of supermarkets, and gas stations were swamped with cars. The situation was similar in scores of other towns and cities along the 1,300-mile-long (2,100-kilometer-long) eastern coastline hit by the tsunami.

In Sendai, as in many areas of the northeast, cell phone service was down, making it difficult for people to communicate with loved ones.

President Barack Obama pledged US assistance following what he called a potentially ‘catastrophic’ disaster. He said one US aircraft carrier was already in Japan and a second was on its way. A US ship was also heading to the Marianas Islands to assist as needed, he said.

Japan’s worst previous quake was a magnitude 8.3 temblor in Kanto that killed 143,000 people in 1923, according to the USGS. A magnitude 7.2 quake in Kobe killed 6,400 people in 1995.

Japan lies on the ‘Ring of Fire’ — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching around the Pacific where about 90 percent of the world’s quakes occur, including the one that triggered the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 countries. A magnitude-8.8 quake that shook central Chile in February 2010 also generated a tsunami and killed 524 people.

Here are comments from experts about what might have happened.

TIMOTHY ABRAM, PROFESSOR OF NUCLEAR FUEL TECHNOLOGY AT BRITAIN’S MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

‘By sampling the air around the station, you’d be able to tell how much radioactivity has been released. The thing they’ll be looking for more than anything is whether there’s any evidence of the fuel actually degrading,’ he told Reuters.

‘If the fuel is substantially intact, then there’ll be a much, much lower release of radioactivity and the explosion that’s happened might be just due to a build-up of steam in the reactor circuit.

‘The most probable (cause of the explosion) is the coolant, particularly if it’s water, can overheat and turn to steam more rapidly than it was designed to cope with.’

He said it was unlikely it would develop into anything more serious, but this would depend on the integrity of the fuel, which contains nearly all the radioactivity of the plant. He said he thought it would be ‘pretty unlikely’ that the fuel itself had been significantly damaged.

He said if this did occur, some radioactive material might be released into the primary circuit, which in turn might be vented into the containment building to release the pressure.

‘Even the worse case scenario from there is the pressure in the containment building itself builds up to dangerous levels and has to be released,’ he said.

‘Consequently you are releasing pressure from in the containment building, some of which contains radioactivity, out into the environment. There are a lot of ifs in that chain of events.’

VALERIY HLYHALO, DEPUTY DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR SAFETY CENTRE

‘The explosion at No. 1 generating set of the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, which took place today, will not be a repetition of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,’ Interfax quoted the Ukrainian expert as saying.

He said that the Japanese nuclear power plants use reactors of a totally different design to Chernobyl’s.

‘Japan has modern-type reactors. All fission products should be isolated by the confinement (the reactor’s protection shell). Only gas emission is possible.’

Hlyhalo said that Japanese nuclear power plants are earthquake resistant.

‘Apart from that, these reactors are designed to work at a high seismicity zone, although what has happened is beyond the impact the plants were designed to withstand. Therefore, the consequences should not be as serious as after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.’

IAN HORE-LACY OF THE WORLD NUCLEAR ASSOCIATION, AN INDUSTRY BODY REPRESENTING 180 COMPANIES IN THE NUCLEAR SECTOR

‘It is obviously an hydrogen explosion ... due to hydrogen igniting. If the hydrogen has ignited, then it is gone, it doesn’t pose any further threat.’

‘The whole situation is quite serious but the actual hydrogen explosion doesn’t add a great deal to it.’

He said it was ‘most unlikely to be a major disaster’ and he also did not believe there would be a full fuel meltdown.

‘That would have been much more likely early yesterday in the European time. We are now 24 hours into the situatiuon and the fuel has cooled a lot in that time and the likelihood of meltdown at this stage I would think would be very, very small.’

ROBIN GRIMES, PROFESSOR OF MATERIALS PHYSICS AT IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

‘It does seem as if the back-up generators although they started initially to work, then failed,’ Grimes, an expert in radiation damage told BBC TV.

‘So it means slowly the heat and the pressure built up in this reactor. One of the things that might just have happened is a large release of that pressure. If it’s that then we’re not in such bad circumstances.

‘Despite the damage to the outer structure, as long as that steel inner vessel remains intact, then the vast majority of the radiation will be contained.

‘At the moment it does seem that they are still contained and it’s a release of significant steam pressure that’s caused this explosion. The key will be the monitoring of those radiation levels.’

PROFESSOR PADDY REGAN, NUCLEAR PHYSICIST FROM BRITAIN’S SURREY UNIVERSITY

‘What is important is where that explosion is,’ Regan told Sky News.

‘It’s not clear what has exploded. The big problem would be if the pressure vessel has exploded but that does not look as though that’s what’s happened.

‘If the pressure vessel, which is the thing that actually holds all the nuclear fuel ... if that was to explode — that’s basically what happened at Chernobyl — you get an enormous release of radioactive material.

‘It doesn’t look from the television pictures ... as though it’s the vessel itself.

He said media reports suggested that a small fraction of the nuclear fuel might have melted at the core of the reactor which would not be surprising.

NUCLEAR EXPERT MARK HIBBS OF THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE

‘We don’t have any information from inside the plant. That is the problem in this case.

‘If it melts down the probability that there would be a breach or that radiation would get outside of the plant because of weakness of the structure of the plant ... is much greater.’