Braving snow, rescue workers search for survivors in the rubble of tsunami-stricken town of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture, five days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami slammed northeastern Japan.
TOKYO: Operators of a quake-crippled nuclear plant in Japan again deployed military helicopters on Thursday in a bid to douse overheating reactors, as US officials warned of the rising risk of a catastrophic radiation leak from spent fuel rods.
While officials were scrambling to contain the nuclear crisis with a patchwork of fixes, the top US nuclear regulator warned that one reactor cooling pool for spent fuel rods may have run dry and another was leaking.
“We believe that around the reactor site there are high levels of radiation,” Gregory Jaczko, head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a US House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing.
“It would be very difficult for emergency workers to get near the reactors. The doses they could experience would potentially be lethal doses in a very short period of time.”
Health experts said panic over radiation leaks from the Daiichi plant was also diverting attention from other threats to survivors of last Friday’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, such as the cold weather and access to fresh water.
The head of the world’s nuclear watchdog, meanwhile, said it was not accurate to say things were “out of control” in Japan, but the situation was “very serious”, with core damage to three units at the plant, around 240 kms north of Tokyo.
The latest images from the plant showed severe damage to some of the buildings after several blasts.
A stream of gloomy warnings and reports on the Japan crisis from experts and officials around the world triggered a swoon in global financial markets, with the Japanese yen surging to all-time highs against the dollar and all three major stock indexes slumping on fears of slower worldwide growth.
Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda on Thursday blamed speculation for the yen’s surge and repeated his warning that he would closely watch market action.
Japan’s Nikkei average slumped on opening on Thursday, and was down nearly 3 percent at 0125 GMT.
G7 finance ministers will hold a conference call later on Thursday to discuss steps to help Japan cope with the financial and economic impact of the disaster, a source said.
Japan’s nuclear agency said radiation levels at the plant “continued to fall”, but the government, in a sign that it was overwhelmed, appealed to private companies to help deliver supplies to tens of thousands of people evacuated from around the complex.
“People would not be in immediate danger if they went outside with these levels. I want people to understand this,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference, referring to people living outside a 30-km exclusion zone.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) officials said bulldozers attempted to clear a route to the reactor so fire trucks could gain access and try to cool the facility using hoses.
Company officials also said they had high hopes of getting limited power to the facility to help pump water needed to cool reactors and the spent fuel rods that have been overheating.
High radiation levels on Wednesday prevented a helicopter from dropping water into the No. 3 reactor to try to cool its fuel rods after an earlier explosion damaged the unit’s roof and cooling system.
Another attempt on Thursday appeared to be partially successful, with two of four water drops over the site hitting their mark.
The plant operator described No. 3 — the only reactor at that uses plutonium in its fuel mix — as the “priority”. Plutonium, once absorbed in the bloodstream, can linger for years in bone marrow or liver and lead to cancer.
If cooling operations do not proceed well, the situation will “reach a critical stage in a couple of days”, said an official with the government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
The situation at No. 4 reactor, where the fire broke out, was “not so good”, TEPCO added, while water was being poured into reactors No.5 and 6, indicating the entire six-reactor facility was now at risk of overheating.
“Getting water into the pools of the No.3 and No.4 reactors is a high priority,” Said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a senior official at Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Administration.
“It could become a serious problem in a few days,” he said.
Stock Exchange Resists Calls To Halt Trading
Panic over the economic impact of last Friday’s massive earthquake and tsunami knocked $620 billion off Japan’s stock market over the first two days of this week, but the Nikkei index rebounded on Wednesday to end up 5.68 per cent.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Financial Services Agency plan to keep the stock market open despite calls for a halt to trading, mainly from foreign financial institutions, the Nikkei business daily said.
TSE President Atsushi Saito said the exchange “will continue to provide investors with an opportunity to trade”, calling it “an important piece of social infrastructure”.
International Frustration
In another sign of international frustration at the pace of updates from Japan, Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he would fly to Japan on Thursday to get first-hand information.
Several experts said the Japanese authorities were underplaying the severity of the incident, particularly on a scale called INES used to rank nuclear incidents. The Japanese have so far rated the accident a four on a one-to-seven scale, but that rating was issued on Saturday and since then the situation has worsened dramatically.
France’s nuclear safety authority ASN said on Tuesday it should be classed as a level-six incident.
At its worst, radiation in Tokyo reached 0.809 microsieverts per hour on Tuesday — 10 times below what a person would receive if exposed to a dental x-ray. Early on Thursday, radiation levels were barely above average.
But many Tokyo residents stayed indoors. Usually busy streets were nearly deserted. Many shops and offices were closed. One bank, Mizuho , said all its automatic teller machines in the country had crashed but it doubted that it was connected to the quake or power cuts.
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