Explosion Heard at Damaged Japan Nuclear Plant

WASHINGTON — Japanese officials issued broad evacuation orders on Saturday for people living near two nuclear power plants whose cooling systems broke down as a result of the earthquake. The officials warned that small amounts of radioactive material were likely to leak from the plants.

Japanese media reported the sound of an explosion at one of the plants. Reuters quoted Jiji news agency as saying there had been an explosion at one of the plants — the 40-year-old Daiichi number one reactor — and television footage showed vapor rising from the plant about 150 miles north of Tokyo. The country’s nuclear safety agency did not confirm the reported incident.
The power plants, known as Daiichi and Daini and operated by Tokyo Electric Power, experienced critical failures of the cooling systems after the plants were shut down, as they were during the quake.
Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan’s nuclear safety commission, said that a meltdown was possible at one of the two Daiichi reactors, The Associated Press reported. Japanese television reported that the country’s Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency said it had detected cesium near one of those reactors.
An agency official said that a valve had been successfully opened to reduce pressure inside that reactor.
Naoto Sekimura, a professor at Tokyo University, told NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, that “only a small portion of the fuel has been melted. But the plant is shut down already, and being cooled down. Most of the fuel is contained in the plant case, so I would like to ask people to be calm.”
About 45,000 people were affected by the evacuation order at the Daiichi plant, where those living within a six-mile radius were told to leave. The evacuation of the second plant was for a one-mile radius because “there is no sign that radiation has been emitted outside,” an official said.
Failure of the cooling systems allowed pressure to build up beyond the design capacity of the reactors. Small amounts of radioactive vapor were expected to be released into the atmosphere to prevent damage to the containment systems, safety officials said. They said that the levels of radiation were not large enough to threaten the health of people outside the plants, and that the evacuations had been ordered as a precaution.
Nuclear safety officials focused initially on the Daiichi plant. But by Saturday morning Japan had declared states of emergency for five reactors at the two plants, an escalation that added to worries about the safety of nuclear facilities in the quake-prone Japanese islands.
The Daiichi and Daini plants are 10 miles apart in Fukushima Prefecture, about 150 miles north of Tokyo and close to the quake’s epicenter off the coast.
The plants’ problems were described as serious but were far short of a catastrophic emergency like the partial core meltdown that occurred at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979.
A Japanese nuclear safety panel said the radiation levels were 1,000 times above normal in a reactor control room at the Daiichi plant. Some radioactive material had also seeped outside, with radiation levels near the main gate measured at eight times normal, NHK quoted nuclear safety officials as saying.
The safety officials said there was “no immediate health hazard” to residents from the leaks, which they described as “minute,” and people were urged to stay calm.
The emergency at the Daiichi plant began shortly after the earthquake struck on Friday afternoon. Emergency diesel generators, which had kicked in to run the reactor’s cooling system after the electrical power grid failed, shut down about an hour after the earthquake. There was speculation that the tsunami knocked the generators out of service.
Twenty hours later, the plant was operating in a battery-controlled cooling mode. Tokyo Electric said that by Saturday morning it had installed a mobile generator at Daiichi to ensure that the cooling system would continue operating even after reserve battery power was depleted. Even so, the company said it was considering a “controlled containment venting” in order to avoid an “uncontrolled rupture and damage” to the containment unit.
“With evacuation in place and the oceanbound wind, we can ensure the safety,” a nuclear safety official, Yukio Edano, said at a news conference early Saturday.
It was not clear, however, how long the cooling systems could continue to function in emergency mode or when normal power supplies could be restored.
Two workers were reported missing at the Daiichi plant, but the company did not explain what might have happened to them.

A pump run by steam, designed to function in the absence of electricity, was adding water to the reactor vessel, and as that water boiled off, it was being released. Such water is usually only slightly radioactive, according to nuclear experts. As long as the fuel stays covered by water, it will remain intact, and the bulk of the radioactive material will stay inside. If the fuel is exposed, it can result in a meltdown. 


The reactors at the two plants shut down when the earthquake began at 2:46 p.m. Friday. At the Daiichi plant’s Reactor Unit 1, when the emergency generators shut down, pressure began to rise in the reactor, leading operators to vent it.
During much of the early morning on Saturday, safety officials focused on getting emergency power supplies to the Daiichi plant to restore the normal cooling function.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking in Washington, said that American military planes had already delivered “coolant.” But American military officials indicated that while they were prepared to help Japan grapple with any problems related to its nuclear facilities, they had not been asked to do so.
Japan relies heavily on nuclear power, which generates just over one-third of the country’s electricity. Its plants are designed to withstand earthquakes, which are common, but experts have long expressed concerns about safety standards, particularly if major quake hit close to a reactor.
One major concern is that while plant operators can quickly shut down a nuclear reactor, they cannot allow the cooling systems to stop working. Even after the plant’s chain reaction is stopped, its fuel rods produce about six percent as much heat as they do when the plant is running. The production of heat drops off sharply in the following hours, but continued cooling is needed or the water will boil away and the fuel will melt, releasing the uranium fragments inside.
Heat from the nuclear fuel rods must be removed by water in a cooling system, but that requires power to run the pumps, align the valves in the pipes and run the instruments. The plant requires a continuous supply of electricity even after the reactor stops generating power.
With the steam-driven pump in operation, pressure valves on the reactor vessel would open automatically as pressure rose too high, or could be opened by operators. “It’s not like they have a breach; there’s no broken pipe venting steam,” said Margaret E. Harding, a nuclear safety consultant who managed a team at General Electric, the reactors’ designer, that analyzed pressure buildup in reactor containments. “You’re getting pops of release valves for minutes, not hours, that take pressure back down.”
Civilian power reactors are designed with emergency diesel generators to assure the ability to continue cooling even during a blackout. Many reactors have two, assuring redundancy; some have three, so that if one must be taken out of service for maintenance, the plant can still keep running.
It was not immediately clear how many diesel generators there are at Daiichi, but the operators reported earlier in the day that they were not working, prompting the evacuation.
Daiichi, which is formally known as Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, was designed by General Electric and entered commercial service in 1971. It was probably equipped to function for some hours without emergency diesel generators, said David Lochbaum, who worked at three American reactor complexes that use G.E. technology.
Mr. Lochbaum, who also worked as an instructor for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on G.E. reactors, said that such reactors were equipped to ride out interruptions in electrical power by using pumps that could be powered by steam, which would still be available in case of electric power failure. Valves can be opened by motors that run off batteries, he said. Plants as old as Fukushima Daiichi 1 generally have batteries that are large enough to operate for four hours, he said.
After that, he said, the heat production in the core is still substantial but has been reduced. The heat would boil away the cooling water, raising pressure in the reactor vessel, until automatic relief valves opened to let out some of the steam. Then the valves would close and the pressure would start building again.
If the cooling system remains inoperative for many hours, the water will eventually boil away, he said, and the fuel will begin to melt. That is what happened at Three Mile Island. In that case, the causes were mechanical failure, operator error and poor design, according to government investigators.


Nini/nytimes

Powerful Quake and Tsunami Devastate Northern Japan

TOKYO — Rescuers struggled to reach survivors on Saturday morning as Japan reeled after an earthquake and a tsunami struck in deadly tandem. The 8.9-magnitude earthquake set off a devastating tsunami that sent walls of water washing over coastal cities in the north. Concerns mounted over possible radiation leaks from two nuclear plants near the earthquake zone.

The death toll from the tsunami and earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in Japan, was in the hundreds, but Japanese news media quoted government officials as saying that it could rise to more than 1,300, most of them drowned. About 200 to 300 bodies were found along the waterline in Sendai, a port city in northeastern Japan and the closest major city to the epicenter.
Thousands of homes were destroyed, many roads were impassable, trains and buses were not running, and power and cellphones remained down. On Saturday morning, the JR rail company said that there were three trains missing in parts of two northern prefectures.
While the loss of life and property may yet be considerable, many lives were certainly saved by Japan’s extensive disaster preparedness and strict construction codes. Japan’s economy was spared a more devastating blow because the earthquake hit far from its industrial heartland.
Japanese officials on Saturday issued broad evacuation orders for people living in the vicinity of two separate nuclear power plants that had experienced breakdowns in their cooling systems as a result of the earthquake, and they warned that small amounts of radiation could leak from both plants. Japanese television reported that officials said they had detected cesium near one of the reactors at one of the plants, and The Associated Press quoted a nuclear safety official as saying a meltdown was possible at that reactor.
On Friday, at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time, the quake struck. First came the roar and rumble of the temblor, shaking skyscrapers, toppling furniture and buckling highways. Then waves as high as 30 feet rushed onto shore, whisking away cars and carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields and highways.
By Saturday morning, Japan was filled with scenes of desperation, as stranded survivors called for help and rescuers searched for people buried in the rubble. Kazushige Itabashi, an official in Natori City, one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami, said several districts in an area near Sendai’s airport were annihilated.
Rescuers found 870 people in one elementary school on Saturday morning and were trying to reach 1,200 people in the junior high school, closer to the water. There was no electricity and no water for people in shelters. According to a newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, about 600 people were on the roof of a public grade school, in Sendai City. By Saturday morning, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and firefighters had evacuated about 150 of them.
On the rooftop of Chuo Hospital in the city of Iwanuma, doctors and nurses were waving white flags and pink umbrellas, according to TV Asahi. On the floor of the roof, they wrote “Help” in English, and “Food” in Japanese. The reporter, observing the scene from a helicopter, said, “If anyone in the City Hall office is watching, please help them.”
The station also showed scenes of people stranded on a bridge, cut off by water on both sides near the mouth of the Abukuma River in Miyagi Prefecture.
People were frantically searching for their relatives. Fumiaki Yamato, 70, was in his second home in a mountain village outside of Sendai when the earthquake struck. He spoke from his car as he was driving toward Sendai trying to find the rest of his family. While it usually takes about an hour to drive to the city, parts of the road were impassable. “I’m getting worried,” he said as he pulled over to take a reporter’s call. “I don’t know how many hours it’s going to take.”
Japanese, accustomed to frequent earthquakes, were stunned by this one’s magnitude and the more than 100 aftershocks, many equivalent to major quakes.

“I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life,” said Toshiaki Takahashi, 49, an official at Sendai City Hall. “I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking, and getting stronger.” 

Train service was shut down across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo, and air travel was severely disrupted.
On Friday, television images showed waves of more than 12 feet roaring inland in Japan. The floodwaters, thick with floating debris shoved inland, pushed aside heavy trucks as if they were toys. The spectacle was all the more remarkable for being carried live on television, even as the waves engulfed flat farmland that offered no resistance. The tsunami could be seen scooping up every vessel in the ocean off Sendai, and churning everything inland. The gigantic wave swept up a ship carrying more than 100 people, Kyodo News reported.
Vasily V. Titov, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the center of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. “In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis,” he said. “But it’s still not enough time.”
Complicating the issue, he added, is that the flat terrain in the area would have made it difficult for people to reach higher, and thus safer, ground. On Friday, NHK television showed images of a huge fire sweeping across Kesennuma, a city of more than 70,000 people in the northeast. Whole blocks appeared to be ablaze. NHK also showed aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing the Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof. The runway was partly submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks.
Even in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, the quake struck hard. William M. Tsutsui, a professor of Japanese business and economic history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was traveling in Tokyo with a business delegation when the ground began to shake. “What was scariest was to look up at the skyscrapers all around,” he said. “They were swaying like trees in the breeze.”
Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the quake and tsunami caused major damage across wide areas.
The United States Geological Survey said the quake was the most severe worldwide since an 8.8-magnitude quake off the coast of Chile a little more than a year ago that killed more than 400. It was less powerful than the 9.1-magnitude quake that struck off Northern Sumatra in late 2004. That quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.
The survey said that Friday’s quake was centered off the coast of Honshu, the most populous of the Japanese islands, at a point about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo and a depth of about 15 miles below the earth’s surface.
President Obama said the United States “stands ready to help” Japan deal with the aftermath. “Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to the people of Japan,” he said in a statement. He later spoke with Mr. Kan and offered assistance.
American military airfields in Japan began accepting civilian flights diverted from airports that suffered damage, American officials said early Friday.
A spokesman for the American Seventh Fleet in Japan said Naval Air Field Atsugi had received several commercial passenger planes that could not land at Narita airport outside Tokyo. Officials said Yokota Air Base also received civilian flights. Three American warships in Southeast Asia will be ordered out to sea to reposition themselves in case they need to provide assistance, a fleet spokesman said.
The tsunami assaulted Hawaii with seven-foot waves, although it caused little damage. Powerful surges that hit the West Coast of the United States caused boats to sink in Santa Cruz Harbor. The Coast Guard reported that one person was swept to sea near McKinleyville, Calif., while trying to take pictures of the waves, and a search had begun.
In Japan, the Tokyo subways emptied, and airports were closed. Many residents set off on epic journeys home, walking for miles across a vast metropolitan area. As late as Saturday morning, 18 hours after the earthquake, thousands of people in dark suits were still trudging home from the central business district. In a video posted on YouTube, rumbles shook a supermarket as shopkeepers rushed to steady toppling wares and a classical music soundtrack played.
On Twitter, a person who used the name sinonosama said that students at an agricultural high school in Miyagi Prefecture were fine, but had to take refuge on the third floor after the tsunami flooded the first two floors.
The quake occurred in what is called a subduction zone, where one of the Earth’s tectonic plates is sliding beneath another. In this case, the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the North American plate at a rate of about three inches a year. The earthquake occurred at a depth of about 15 miles, which while relatively shallow by global standards is about normal for quakes in this zone, said Emily So, an engineer with the United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.
When such quakes set off a tsunami, the devastation often comes from a succession of waves, which can cross oceans at 500 miles per hour or more.

Nini/nytimes

Japan Tsunami 8,9 video news

Video : news Tsunami Japan

news video : Japan Tsunami | Japan Earthquake (8,9)

Earthquake Japan (8,9) | Tsunami Japan | Gempa Bumi Jepang Terbaru | 11/...

Japan Earthquake (8,9) | Tsunami Japan | Gempa Bumi Jepang | 11-03-11

washingtonpost.com : World Show Playlist & Video Information From NHK World: New views of tsunami devastation

South Korea Sends Rescue Team, Search Dogs To Quake-Hit Japan

SEOUL/TOKYO,  -- South Korea will send a special team comprising of rescue workers and search dogs to facilitate search and rescue (SAR) operations in the aftermath of the massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake which hit northeast Japan, killing hundreds and causing widespread devastation.

The five-member team together with two dogs and rescue equipments, is sent to Tokyo at the request of the Japanese government, Yonhap news agency reported Saturday.

Another 120 relief workers, medical personnel and three military transport planes are on standby to head for Japan, if more help is requested.

President Lee Myung-bak expressed sympathy and pledged full support to help the Japanese government to recover from the major undersea quake that triggered a vast tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan.

Early on Saturday, Masatoshi Muto, Japan's ambassador to South Korea, met First Vice Foreign Minister Park Seok-hwan in Seoul and thanked Seoul for its support in relief efforts, ministry officials said.

At the meeting, Park said the South Korean government will "do everything it can" to help Japan recover from the quake.

Meanwhile, the South's Foreign Ministry will send Saturday an emergency team to Japan to assess any injuries or damages to its nationals staying in the quake-hit areas, officials said.

The team is scheduled to arrive in Sendai, a Japanese city closest to the earthquake's epicenter, on Saturday night, the ministry said.

Officials in Seoul and Tokyo said they were trying to check for possible South Korean casualties, but telecommunication problems were hampering their efforts.

"The embassy and other organizations are making utmost efforts to assess damages to our nationals and tourists, but we are experiencing difficulties because of disruptions in telecommunications and transportation," said Kwon Chul-hyun, the South Korean ambassador to Japan.

The possibilities of Korean injuries or deaths cannot be ruled out because about 910,000 South Koreans live in Japan, some 10,000 of them in the Sendai area hit by the quake, they said.

About 30 Korean nationals living in the Japanese prefecture of Iwate have not yet been contacted by a South Korean consulate in Sendai, according to officials.

In particular, one Korean national living in the Japanese coastal city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture, which was completely destroyed by the tsunami, is unaccounted for, according to the ministry.

Media reports said the Friday quake and tsunami have left over 1,000 people feared dead and forced evacuations of thousands of people around nuclear power plants north of Tokyo.

Nini/Bernama