Japan quake causes emergencies at 5 nuke reactors

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Japan quake causes emergencies at 5 nuke reactors
Emergencies at 5 nuclear reactors in Japan after quake knocks out power to cooling systems

Mari Yamaguchi and Jeff Donn, Associated Press, On Friday March 11, 2011, 8:23 pm EST
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday's powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns.

Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant's Unit 1 scrambled ferociously 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 6.2 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. Nearly 14,000 people living near the two power plants were ordered to evacuate.

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.

Officials at the Daiichi facility began venting radioactive vapors from the unit to relieve pressure inside the reactor case. The loss of electricity had delayed that effort for several hours.

Plant workers there labored to cool down the reactor core, but there was no prospect for immediate success. They were temporarily cooling the reactor with a secondary system, but it wasn't working as well as the primary one, according to Yuji Kakizaki, an official at the Japanese nuclear safety agency.

Even once a reactor is shut down, radioactive byproducts give off heat that can ultimately produce volatile hydrogen gas, melt radioactive fuel, or even breach the containment building in a full meltdown belching radioactivity into the surroundings, according to technical and government authorities.

Despite plans for the intentional release of radioactivity, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the 40-year-old plant was not leaking radiation.

"With evacuation in place and the ocean-bound wind, we can ensure the safety," Edano said at a televised news conference early Saturday.

It was unclear if the elevation of radioactivity around the reactor was known at the time he spoke.

The outside measurement of radiation at Daiichi was far below the allowed limit for a year, other officials said, reporting that it would take 70 days standing at the gate to reach the yearly limit.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician who runs a disaster preparedness institute at Columbia University, said the reported level of radiation outside the plant would not pose an immediate danger, though it could lift the rate of thyroid cancer in a population over time.

However, he called the reported level inside the plant extraordinarily high, raising a concern about acute health effects. "I would personally absolutely not want to be inside," he said.

While the condition of the reactor cores was of utmost concern, Tokyo Electric Power Co. also warned of power shortages and an "extremely challenging situation in power supply for a while."

The Daiichi site is located in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo. The 460-megawatt Unit 1 began operating in 1971 and is the oldest at the site. It is a boiling water reactor that drives the turbine with radioactive water, unlike pressurized water reactors usually found in the United States. Japanese regulators decided in February to allow it to run another 10 years.

The temperature inside the reactor wasn't reported, but Japanese regulators said it wasn't dropping as quickly as they wanted.

Kakizaki, the safety agency official, said the emergency cooling system is intact and could kick in as a last line of defense. "That's as a last resort, and we have not reached that stage yet," he added.

Defense Ministry official Ippo Maeyama said dozens of troops trained for chemical disasters had been dispatched to the plant in case of a radiation leak, along with four vehicles designed for use in atomic, biological and chemical warfare.

Technical experts said the plant would presumably have hours, but probably not days, to try to stabilize things.

Leonard S. Spector, director of the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said loss of coolant is the most serious type of accident at a nuclear power plant.

"They are busy trying to get coolant to the core area," said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The big thing is trying to get power to the cooling systems."

High-pressure pumps can temporarily cool a reactor in this state with battery power, even when electricity is down, according to Arnold Gundersen, a nuclear engineer who used to work in the U.S. nuclear industry. They can open and close relief valves needed to control pressure. Batteries would go dead within hours but could be replaced.

The IAEA said "mobile electricity supplies" had arrived at the Daiichi plant. It wasn't clear if they were generators or batteries.

It also was not immediately clear how closely the reactor had moved toward dangerous pressure or temperature levels. If temperatures were to keep rising to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it could set off a chemical reaction that begins to embrittle the metallic zirconium that sheathes the radioactive uranium fuel.

That reaction releases hydrogen, which can explode when cooling water finally floods back into the reactor. That was also concern for a time during the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.

If the reactor temperature keeps reaches around 4,000 degrees, the fuel could melt outright, and the reactor could slump right into the bottom of the containment building in a partial meltdown. Then the crucial question would be whether the building would stay intact.

"The last line of defense is that containment -- and that's got to hold," Gundersen said. If it doesn't, the radioactive load inside the reactor can pour out into the surroundings.

The plant is just south of the Miyagi prefecture, which was the region hardest hit by the quake. A fire broke out at another nuclear plant in that area in a turbine building at one of the Onagawa power reactors. Smoke poured from the building, but the fire was put out. Turbine buildings of such boiling water reactors, though separate from the reactor, do contain radioactive water, but at much lower levels than inside the reactor. A water leak was reported in another Onagawa reactor.

No radioactive releases were reported in any of the other affected plants.

As Japan is one of the most seismically active nations in the world, it has strict sets of regulations designed to limit the impact of quakes on nuclear power plants. These standards call for constructing plants on solid bedrock to reduce shaking.

As one of the most seismically active countries in the world, Japan has strict sets of regulations designed to limit the impact of quakes on nuclear power plants. These standards call for building plants on solid bedrock to reduce shaking.

Even so, 10 of Japan's 54 commercial reactors were shut down because of the quake, and Tokyo Electric Power said it had to reduce power generation. Japan gets about 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.

AP National Writer Jeff Donn reported from Boston.

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Quake brings modern Tokyo to a standstill
Japan's massive quake grinds modern Tokyo to a halt, stranding hordes of commuters

Jay Alabaster, Associated Press, On Friday March 11, 2011, 8:16 pm EST
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's huge earthquake brought super-modern Tokyo to a standstill as it paralyzed trains that normally run like clockwork, crippled mobile phones, stranded hordes of commuters and trapped scores of people in elevators.

The magnitude-8.9 quake that struck off the coast Friday afternoon and triggered a deadly tsunami in the northeast also violently shook buildings in the capital, where halted trains choked an evening commuter flow of more than 10 million people.

"This is the kind of earthquake that hits once every 100 years," said restaurant worker Akira Tanaka, 54.

He gave up waiting for trains to resume and decided -- for his first time ever -- to set off on foot for his home 12 miles (20 kilometers) north of the capital. "I've been walking an hour and 10 minutes, still have about three hours to go," he said.

Tokyo prides itself on being an orderly, technologically savvy, even futuristic city. Residents usually can rely on a huge, criss-crossing network of train and subway lines. But authorities were forced to scan the entire web for quake damage and cancel nearly all trains for the rest of the day.

Tomoko Suzuki and her elderly mother were unable to get to their 29th-floor condominium because of a stalled elevator. They unsuccessfully tried to hail a taxi to a relative's house and couldn't immediately find a hotel room in their neighborhood.

"We are so cold," Suzuki said Friday evening on a crowded corner. "We really don't know what to do."

Although there were no power outages in central Tokyo, some elevators may have been damaged in the quake while some others were intentionally shut down as a precaution. Elsewhere, widespread electricity outages left millions of homes and buildings without power.

In all, 163 people were reported trapped in elevators throughout the country, the Transportation Ministry said, with 75 of them still stuck Saturday morning. It wasn't clear how many of those were in Tokyo.

Tens of thousands of people milled at the capital's train stations, roamed its streets or hunkered down at 24-hour cafes, hotels and government offices offered as emergency accommodations.

Mobile phone lines were crammed, preventing nearly all calls and text messages. Calls to northeastern Japan, where a 23-foot (7-meter) tsunami washed ashore after the quake, generally failed to go through, with a recording saying the area's lines were busy.

Unable to rely on their mobile phones, people formed lines at Tokyo's normally vacant public phone booths dotting the city.

Japan's top telecommunications company, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., set up an emergency phone line and a special Internet site for people to leave messages for family and friends.

Up to 90 percent of calls were being restricted to prevent telecom equipment from being overloaded, NTT spokeswoman Mai Kariya said. The company was checking on damage to towers and cables.

Osamu Akiya, 46, was working in the office of a Tokyo trading company when the quake sent bookshelves and computers crashing to the floor and opened cracks in the walls.

"I've been through many earthquakes, but I've never felt anything like this," he said.

A handful of subway lines resumed service after a six-hour outage, and officials said they would run all night, past their usual hours.

When Tokyo trains suffer rare problems, they usually are running again within an hour. So, many people initially waited at stations. But when the railway company announced a suspension of nearly all service for the day, crowds poured into the streets.

City officials offered more than 60 government offices, university campuses and other locations for stranded commuters to spend the night.

The Tokyo suburb of Yokohama offered blankets for people who wanted to sleep at the community's main concert hall.

"There has never been a big earthquake like this, when all the railways stopped and so this is a first for us," Yokohama Arena official Hideharu Terada said. "People are trickling in. They are all calm."

Associated Press writers Yuri Kageyama and Tomoko A. Hosaka contributed to this report.

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Quake and tsunami a blow to fragile Japan economy
Disaster a blow to already fragile Japanese economy; rebuilding could be a boost later

Paul Wiseman and Christopher S. Rugaber, AP Economics Writers, On Friday March 11, 2011, 5:40 pm EST
The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday forced multinational companies to close factories, fight fires and move workers, inflicting at least short-term damage on the Japan's fragile economy.

Assessing the full economic impact was impossible in the hours after the quake. But traffic clogged streets, trains stopped, flights were grounded and phone service was disrupted or cut off. U.S. companies DuPont and Procter & Gamble said communications problems made it hard to gauge the effect on their operations in Japan.

Japanese stocks plunged. The benchmark Nikkei index fell 1.7 percent, and the Japanese market was only open for about 15 minutes after the quake.

Still, the damage to Japan's economy, the world's third-largest, wasn't nearly as severe as it might have been. The devastated northeastern coastal region is far less developed than the Tokyo metro area.

"Something similar hitting Tokyo Bay would have been unimaginable," said Michael Smitka, an economist who specializes in Japan at Washington and Lee University.

And in the long run, the disaster could help the Japanese economy as reconstruction projects put people back to work.

Natural disasters "do eventually boost output," said David Hensley, an economist at JPMorgan Chase. The 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the 1994 Northridge quake outside Los Angeles, for example, ultimately helped the local California economies, he said.

Takuji Okubo, an analyst at French bank Societe Generale, said Japan's economy will probably take a hit in March and then rebound strongly. Japanese consumers will need to replace lost cars and appliances, and reconstruction will start.

"The earthquake will most likely lead to stronger growth in 2011, rather than weaker," Okubo said.

Okubo noted that industrial production in Japan fell 2.6 percent in January 1995, the month of the devastating earthquake near the city of Kobe. But it rebounded 2.2 percent the following month and 1 percent the month after that.

Overall, Japan's economy grew 1.9 percent that year and 2.6 percent in 1996, Okubo said -- faster than the anemic pace it had been growing. In 1996, private consumption rose at double the rate of an average year between 1995 and 2004.

On Friday, Japanese auto companies halted production at some assembly plants. But it was not clear whether the catastrophe would have a major effect on the global auto industry. Japan's central Aichi prefecture, site of much of the country's auto manufacturing, is far from the disaster zone in northeastern Japan.

Analysts said the damage to production seemed to be limited. But the status of the ports and roads that automakers rely on to move their vehicles remains unclear.

"I don't think in the end it's going to be more than a passing impact," said Ephraim Levy, an auto industry analyst with Standard & Poor's Equity Research. "It would mostly impact Japanese sales, including exports. Some of that may just be deferred rather than lost."

Levy cautioned, though, that it was still hard to assess the damage to Japanese infrastructure.

The Japanese economy has been stagnant for more than a decade. It shrank at a 1.3 percent annual pace in the final three months of 2010. By contrast, the U.S. government estimates the American economy grew at a 2.8 percent annual rate over the same period.

Japan's central bank vowed to do everything necessary to keep financial markets stable, including pumping cash into the financial system.

Toyota Motor Corp., the world's biggest automaker, closed two auto assembly plants. The company operates 15 plants in Japan.

There were no immediate reports of injuries among its workers, spokeswoman Monika Saito said. Parts makers were also shut down, she said.

Honda is closing four plants temporarily. A Honda employee was killed and more than 30 people were injured when walls and parts of a ceiling crumbled at a Honda research facility in northeastern Tochigi prefecture, the company said.

Nissan Motor Co. shut down production at five of its plants in northeastern Japan and in the Yokohama area near Tokyo. It said two workers were slightly injured at its Tochigi plant and its technical center in Kanagawa prefecture, near Tokyo.

For Japanese manufacturers overall, "there will be losses for a couple of months because of disruptions to the supply chain," Smitka says.

Research firm IHS iSuppli said it expects shipments of electronic chips from Japanese factories to be slowed in the next two weeks by the disruption of transportation links. Japan is also a crucial supplier of components for LCD screens, used in TVs, laptop computers and phones.

Some companies had to move their workers to safety. Janie Eudy of Pineville, La., said her husband, Danny, was working at a nuclear plant in Fukushima when the earthquake struck.

After being asked to leave, he called her hours later from the parking lot of his quake-ravaged hotel. He and other American plant workers are "waiting to be rescued, and they're in bad shape," she said in a telephone interview.

Air traffic was disrupted. Seven United flights and two Continental flights from the United States to Tokyo's Narita International Airport were diverted overnight, mostly to other airports in Asia. Delta canceled 29 flights into and out of Tokyo.

Japan is just weeks away from its peak tourism season: late March and early April, when cherry trees blossom, said Alastair Donnelly, co-founder of InsideJapan Tours, a British company that sends more than 5,000 tourists from the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia to Japan each year.

"I encourage people still to travel. Japan will need support from tourism," Donnelly said.

Tourism to the beach communities of Southeast Asia dried up after the 2004 tsunami, devastating the livelihood of the survivors.

"You don't want to make people suffer twice," Donnelly said.

Japan is a big grain and beef importer, but the disaster probably won't hurt the world's food markets significantly, said Darin Newsom, senior analyst at Telvent DTN in Omaha, Neb.

"Certainly it's catastrophic in Japan, but not for the global markets probably," Newsome said.

Japan's government debt is already at alarming levels: 225 percent of economic output, one of the highest figures in the world. Even at a time of heightened concern about the federal deficit, U.S. government debts were just 59 percent of output last year. Japan's debt burden raises questions about Japan's ability to finance a massive rebuilding program.

Dan Ryan, an economist at IHS Global Insight, cautioned that rebuilding will require more government borrowing, which could unsettle bond investors.

But Smitka says he thinks Japan can easily raise the money because its government bonds are held mainly by Japanese investors -- not foreigners who might balk or demand a punitive interest rate.

James Shuck, an insurance industry analyst for the investment bank Jefferies, estimates the insurance industry's losses in Japan at $10 billion. That would make it the costliest Japanese earthquake for insurers ever. By comparison, the Northridge quake cost insurers about $23 billion in today's dollars.

The liability in the Japan quake is limited, Shuck says, because it struck outside a major urban area and because only about 10 percent of Japanese households buy earthquake insurance.

Wiseman and Rugaber reported from Washington. AP Business Writers Ken Thomas in Washington, Chris Kahn, Samantha Bomkamp, Pallavi Gogoi, Scott Mayerowitz and Peter Svensson in New York, Sandy Shore in Denver, David Koenig in Dallas, Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and Christopher Leonard in St. Louis contributed to this report.

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Japan Quake's Financial Impact: Five Things to Watch...

On Friday March 11, 2011, 1:42 pm EST
While commodity and currency markets took the biggest immediate hit from Friday's earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the damage will be felt throughout the world's economy and the US.

In addition to the massive human toll, the quake and ensuing tsunami will exact an economic toll on Japan, which is still struggling to shake the detritus of its "lost decade" brought on by economic stagnation.

The price on both fronts is impossible to calculate at this point, but it no doubt will be profound.

"It's going to be of the most expensive disasters in history before it's done," Dennis Gartman, hedge fund manager and author of The Gartman Letter investor bulletin, told CNBC. "This is not just a Japanese circumstance, this is on both sides of the Pacific and the dollars are going to add up very quickly."

Here, then, is a look at five of the main financial effects of the crisis:

1. Ultimately, a Recovery

After Japan copes with its massive human and financial loss, the country will have to focus on rebuilding. That will take billions in private and public funds, a stimulative effort that, grimly ironic though it may be, will generate some level of stimulus and recovery.



"Obviously the human toll is the most important thing," said Nicholas Colas, chief investment strategist at ConvergEx in New York. "Generally afterward you get a big rebound in economic growth. Rebuilding creates a lot of jobs for a lot of people and a lot of new wealth creation."

Those jobs likely will come across a variety of fields, particularly in construction and energy, which sustained heavy damage from the quake.

"There's certainly going to be a lot of resources directed toward rebuilding that part of Japan," said David Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities in New York. "It's not all going to come from the government-it's going to come from insurance companies, private companies and private savings to divert resources toward rebuilding a devastated part of the island."

The Bank of Japan meets Monday to discuss monetary policy; Capital Economics in London said a loosening is likely.



2. A Stronger Yen

The widely circulated Japanese currency is going to have to come home to help rebuild the country, meaning that the historically weak yen is going to start rising against its counterparts.

That trend quickly took hold during Friday trading, when the yen gained nearly 1.5 percent against the US dollar and nearly 1 percent against the Swiss franc. It's a trend likely to continue, with some volatility, as the country and its companies bring yen back to the mainland.

"Money is going to be repatriated back to Japan to pay for the damages," Gartman said. "That's going to be required to take care of the impact-the dollar impact, the yen impact-of the (damage) there."

3. Oil Prices Could Drop, But Only Briefly

Energy prices fell sharply Friday, partly in response to a likely drop in demand from Japan and partly from the supposed Day of Rage in Saudi Arabia amounting to less turmoil than anticipated.

How long the trend lower lasts, though, is a matter of debate, as the lull in the Middle East is probably only temporary, speculators continue to scoop up oil contracts at a record pace, and emerging market growth acts to put a floor under any major slides.

"Japan is still a very large economy. They import all their oil, they don't have any natural oil reserves," Colas said. "There is less requirement for energy."

4. Less Demand for US Treasurys?

On a normal day, a disaster on the scale of the Japan tragedy might send global investors into the safety of US Treasurys.

Yet yields rose Friday, and while there were multiple explanations-profit taking after a strong week of auctions and some decent economic data-some feared that the third-largest buyer of US debt after the Federal Reserve and China might not have as much money to buy Treasurys.

"It begs the question of whether the Japanese will be able to step in and continue to be big buyers of Treasurys," said Quincy Krosby, general strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, N.J. "You have to believe that they're going to have to use quite a bit of their money towards rebuilding infrastructure."

Japan held $882 billion of Treasurys at the end of 2010, a number that had been steadily increasing since June. China remains the top foreign buyer of US debt, with $1.16 trillion on its books.

5. A Modest Hit to Stocks

Global equity markets languished Friday, with Asian stocks losing as much as 5 percent soon after the earthquake news hit.



But by the time US investors had to digest the situation, focus seemed to drift elsewhere as the market mainly looked at the balance between a consumer trying to rebound, a higher trade deficit and surging gasoline prices.

As a result, stock prices actually were edging higher heading into afternoon trading.

"There have been a lot of catalysts recently that could have taken this market a lot lower. Look at all that's come down recently," said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. "I'm not sure this one is doing to do it any more than the rest of them."

Industries within the market-insurers in particular-may take a hit. But more broadly speaking the effects from Japan most likely will take firmer root elsewhere, despite anticipation for just such an exogenous effect that might trigger a pullback from the two-year rally.

"I don't think this is the event that would create fear and uncertainty in the market," said Todd Horwitz, chief strategist for the Adam Mesh Trading Group in New York. "It's a natural event, an earthquake. They'll recover."

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Japanese ordered indoors in radiation leak crisis
ERIC TALMADGE - AP - 33 mins ago

SOMA, Japan (AP) — High levels of radiation leaked from a crippled nuclear plant in tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan after a third reactor was rocked by an explosion Tuesday and a fourth caught fire in a dramatic escalation of the 4-day-old catastrophe. The government warned 140,000 people nearby to stay indoors to avoid exposure.

Tokyo also reported slightly elevated radiation levels, but officials said the increase was too small to threaten the 39 million people in and around the capital, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) away.

In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation has spread from four reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Fukushima state, one of the hardest-hit in Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that has killed more than 10,000 people, plunged millions into misery and pummeled the world's third-largest economy.

Officials just south of Fukushima reported up to 100 times the normal levels of radiation Tuesday morning, Kyodo News agency reported. While those figures are worrying if there is prolonged exposure, they are far from fatal.

Kan and other officials warned there is danger of more leaks and told people living within 19 miles (30 kilometers) of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex to stay indoors to avoid exposure that could make people sick.

"Please do not go outside. Please stay indoors. Please close windows and make your homes airtight," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told residents in the danger zone. "Don't turn on ventilators. Please hang your laundry indoors."

"These are figures that potentially affect health. There is no mistake about that," he said.

Weather forecasts for Fukushima were for snow and wind from the northeast Tuesday evening, blowing southwest toward Tokyo, then shifting and blowing west out to sea. That's important because it shows which direction a possible nuclear cloud might blow.

The nuclear crisis is the worst Japan has faced since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. It is also the first time that such a grave nuclear threat has been raised in the world since a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine exploded in 1986.

Some 70,000 people had already been evacuated from a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius from the Dai-ichi complex and about 140,000 remain in the zone for which the new warning was issued.

Workers were striving to stabilize three reactors at the power plant that exploded in the wake of Friday's quake and tsunami, after losing their ability to cool down and releasing some radiation. A fourth reactor that was shut down caught fire on Tuesday and more radiation was released, Edano said.

The fire was put out. Even though the fourth reactor was shut down, the fire there was believed to be the source of the elevated radiation.

"It is likely that the level of radiation increased sharply due to a fire at Unit 4," Edano said. "Now we are talking about levels that can damage human health. These are readings taken near the area where we believe the releases are happening. Far away, the levels should be lower."

He said another reactor whose containment building exploded Monday had not contributed greatly to the increased radiation.

Officials said 50 workers, all of them wearing protective radiation gear, were still trying to put water into the reactors to cool them. They say 800 other staff were evacuated. The fires and explosions at the reactors have injured 15 workers and military personnel and exposed up to 190 people to elevated radiation.

In Tokyo, slightly higher-than-normal radiation levels were detected Tuesday but officials insisted there are no health dangers.

"The amount is extremely small, and it does not raise health concerns. It will not affect us," Takayuki Fujiki, a Tokyo government official said.

Kyodo reported that radiation levels nine times higher than normal were briefly detected in Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo and that the Tokyo metropolitan government said it had detected a small amount of radioactive materials in the city's air.

Japanese government officials are being rightly cautious, said Donald Olander, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at University of California at Berkeley. He believed even the heavily elevated levels of radiation around Dai'ichi are "not a health hazard." But without knowing specific dose levels, he said it was hard to make judgments on the evacuation orders.

"Right now it's worse than Three Mile Island," Olander said. But, he said, it's nowhere near the levels released during Chernobyl.

On Three Mile Island, the radiation leak was held inside the containment shell — thick concrete armor around the reactor. The Chernobyl reactor had no shell and was also operational when the disaster struck. The Japanese reactors automatically shut down when the quake hit and are encased in containment shells.

Olander said encasing the reactors in a concrete sarcophagus — the last-ditch effort done in Chernobyl — is far too premature. Operators need to wait until they cool more, or risk making the situation even worse.

The death toll from last week's earthquake and tsunami jumped Tuesday as police confirmed the number killed had topped 2,400, though that grim news was overshadowed by a deepening nuclear crisis. Officials have said previously that at least 10,000 people may have died in Miyagi province alone.

Millions of people spent a fourth night with little food, water or heating in near-freezing temperatures as they dealt with the loss of homes and loved ones. Asia's richest country hasn't seen such hardship since World War II.

Hajime Sato, a government official in Iwate prefecture, one of the hardest-hit, said deliveries of supplies were only 10 percent of what is needed. Body bags and coffins were running so short that the government may turn to foreign funeral homes for help, he said.

Though Japanese officials have refused to speculate on the death toll, Indonesian geologist Hery Harjono, who dealt with the 2004 Asian tsunami, said it would be "a miracle really if it turns out to be less than 10,000" dead.

The 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people — of which only 184,000 bodies were found.

The impact of the earthquake and tsunami on the world's third-largest economy helped drag down the share markets. The benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average plunged for a second day Tuesday, nose-diving more than 12 percent to 8,422.21 while the broader Topix lost 13 percent.

To lessen the damage, Japan's central bank injected $61.2 billion Tuesday into the money markets after pumping in $184 billion on Monday.

Initial estimates put repair costs in the tens of billions of dollars, costs that would likely add to a massive public debt that, at 200 percent of gross domestic product, is the biggest among industrialized nations.

In a bid to stop the reactors at the nuclear plant from melting down, engineers have been injecting seawater as a coolant of last resort.

Yuta Tadano, a 20-year-old pump technician at the Fukushima power plant, said he was on the second floor of an office building in the complex when quake hit.

"It was terrible. The desks were thrown around and the tables too. The walls started to crumble around us and there was dust everywhere. The roof began to collapse.

"We got outside and confirmed everyone was safe . Then we got out of there. We had no time to be tested for radioactive exposure. I still haven't been tested," Tadano told The Associated Press at an evacuation center outside the exclusion zone.

"We live about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the facility. We had to figure out on our own where to go," said Tadano, cradling his 4-month-old baby, Shoma. "I worry a lot about fallout. If we could see it we could escape, but we can't."

The Dai-ichi plant is the most severely affected of three nuclear complexes that were declared emergencies after suffering damage in Friday's quake and tsunami, raising questions about the safety of such plants in coastal areas near fault lines and adding to global jitters over the industry.

___

Yuasa reported from Tokyo. Associated Press writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed to this report.


In this image made off Japan's NTV/NNN Japan television footage, smoke ascends from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant's Unit 3 in Okumamachi, Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, Monday, March...

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Japan's nuclear reactors under states of emergency
The Associated Press - AP - Mon Mar 14, 7:38PM CDT

Japan is struggling to prevent nuclear catastrophe at its reactors in the days since a massive earthquake and tsunami knocked out power, crippling cooling systems needed to keep nuclear fuel from melting down.

So far, there are nine nuclear reactors at three sites in Japan that are under states of emergency — three at Fukushima Dai-ichi, three at Fukushima Daini and three at Onagawa. All are northeast of Tokyo and all are boiling water reactors.

Here's what is known about each:

— Dai-ichi Unit 1: Some uranium pellets in the fuel core have already melted. Workers trying to prevent total meltdown, released steam in attempt to lower pressure in reactor vessel. Led to hydrogen explosion that blew away much of the containment building. Reactor vessel said to be intact. Regular cooling methods have failed; large amounts of seawater being pumped into reactor vessel to try cooling the severely overheated uranium core. Offsite radiation has been reported.

— Dai-ichi Unit 2: Ability to cool unit has been lost. Officials say fuel rods have been fully exposed, at least twice. An attempt to channel seawater into the reactor failed due to stuck rod, so officials were trying to spray cool water on the top of the reactor vessel. Explosion occurred early Tuesday at this reactor. Partial fuel melt believed to have already occurred.

— Dai-ichi Unit 3: Hydrogen explosion on Monday. Radiation believed released. Officials using seawater to cool the unit. Partial meltdown also has occurred.

— Daini units 1, 2 and 4: Retained offsite power, but operators were experiencing equipment failures and increased pressure inside the containment vessels. There have been problems with residual heat removal systems.

— Onagawa units 1, 2 and 3: Officials have said they'd detected higher-than-permitted radiation levels. When the levels fell, they said the radiation could have been from a release at the Dai-ichi units.

___

SOURCE:

Official government and industry statements in Japan and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

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AP IMPACT: US spent-fuel storage sites are packed
AP IMPACT: Yucca Mountain wouldn't be enough for 72K tons of spent nuclear fuel at US plants

Jonathan Fahey and Ray Henry, The Associated Press, On Tuesday March 22, 2011, 7:28 pm
The nuclear crisis in Japan has laid bare an ever-growing problem for the United States -- the enormous amounts of still-hot radioactive waste accumulating at commercial nuclear reactors in more than 30 states.

The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could have handled.

Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release from a nuclear reactor.

Spent fuel at Dai-ichi overheated, possibly melting fuel-rod casings and spewing radiation into the air, after Japan's tsunami knocked out power to cooling systems at the plant.

The rest of the spent fuel from commercial U.S. reactors has been put into dry cask storage, but regulators only envision those as a solution for about a century and the waste would eventually have to be deposited into a Yucca-like facility.

The U.S. nuclear industry says the waste is being stored safely at power-plant sites, though it has long pushed for a long-term storage facility. Meanwhile, the industry's collective pile of waste is growing by about 2,200 tons a year; experts say some of the pools in the United States contain four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed to handle.

The AP analyzed a state-by-state summary of spent fuel data based on information that nuclear power plants voluntarily report every year to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry and lobbying group. The NEI would not make available the amount of spent fuel at individual power plants.

While the U.S. Department of Energy previously reported figures on overall spent fuel storage, it no longer has updated information available. A spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear power plant safety, said the capacities of fuel pools are public record, but exact inventories of spent fuel are tracked in a government database kept confidential for security reasons.

The U.S. has 104 operating nuclear reactors, situated on 65 sites in 31 states. There are another 15 permanently shut reactors that also house spent fuel.

Four states have spent fuel even though they don't have operating commercial plants. Reactors in Colorado, Oregon and Maine are permanently shut; spent fuel from all three is stored in dry casks. Idaho never had a commercial reactor, but waste from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania is being stored at a federal facility there.

Illinois has 9,301 tons of spent nuclear fuel at its power plants, the most of any state in the country, according to industry figures. It is followed by Pennsylvania with 6,446 tons; 4,290 in South Carolina and roughly 3,780 tons each for New York and North Carolina.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life -- some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.

How dangerous these elements are depends on how easily can find their way into the body. Plutonium and uranium are heavy, and don't spread through the air well, but there is a concern that plutonium could leach into water supplies over thousands of years.

Cesium-137 is easily transported by air. It is cesium-137 that can still be detected in a New Jersey-sized patch of land around the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in the Ukraine in 1986.

Typically, waste must sit in pools at least five years before being moved to a cask or permanent storage, but much of the material in the pools of U.S. plants has been stored there far longer than that.

Safety advocates have long urged the NRC to force utility operators to reduce the amount of spent fuel in their pools. The more tightly packed they are, the more quickly they can overheat and spew radiation into the environment in case of an accident, a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

Industry leaders say new technology has made fuel pools safer, and regulators have taken some steps since the 9/11 terror attacks to reduce fuel pool risks. Kevin Crowley, who directs the nuclear and radiation studies board at the National Academy of Sciences, says lessons will be learned from the crisis in Japan. And NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko says his agency will review how spent fuel is stored in the U.S.

A 2004 report by the academy suggested that fresh spent fuel, which is radioactively hotter, be spread among older, cooler assemblies in the spent fuel pool. "You're buying yourself time, basically," says Crowley. "The cooler ones can act as a thermal buffer."

First Energy, which runs two nuclear power stations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, was able to reconfigure the spent fuel rods in its pools to make more room. Still, the company is now running out of space, says spokesman Todd Schneider. Ohio has 1,136 tons of spent fuel in pools and 37 tons in dry casks.

The casks in the U.S. are kept outdoors, generally on concrete pads, but industry officials insist they are safe. Unlike the pools, the casks don't need electricity; they are cooled by air circulation.

One cask model, selling for $1.5 million, places spent fuel inside a stainless steel canister, which is placed inside an "overpack" -- an outside shell composed of a layer of carbon steel, 27 inches of concrete and another layer of carbon steel. When in place, the system stands 20 feet tall and weighs 150,000 pounds, said Joy Russell, a spokeswoman for manufacturer Holtec International of Florida.

Russell said engineers have designed the system to withstand a crash from an F-16 fighter jet and survive the resulting jet fuel fire.

Plant operators in some states have moved aggressively to dry cask storage. Virginia has 1,533 tons of nuclear waste in dry storage and 1,105 tons in spent fuel pools. Maryland has 844 tons in dry storage and 588 tons in spent fuel pools.

Utilities in Texas, though, have not. There are 2,178 tons kept in spent fuel pools at reactor sites there, and zero in dry casks. In New York, 3,345 tons are in spent fuel pools while only 454 tons are in dry storage.

No cask is totally invulnerable, but the academy report found that radioactive releases from casks would be relatively low.

"If you attacked a fuel cask and managed to put a hole in it, anything that came out, the consequences would be very local," Crowley said.

Casks can be licensed for 20 years, with renewals, said Carrie Phillips, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which has a dozen such casks at its two-reactor Joseph M. Farley plant near Columbia, Ala. She said officials have "every expectation" the casks could last "in excess of 100 years by design."

But not the needed tens of thousands of years. For long-term storage, the government had looked to Yucca Mountain. It was designed to hold 77,160 tons -- 69,444 tons designated for commercial waste and 7,716 for military waste. That means the current inventory already exceeds Yucca's original planned capacity.

A 1982 law gave the federal government responsibility for the long-term storage of nuclear waste and promised to start accepting waste in 1998. After 20 years of study, Congress passed a law in 2002 to build a nuclear waste repository deep in Yucca Mountain.

The federal government spent $9 billion developing the project, but the Obama administration has cut funding and recalled the license application to build it. Nevadans have fiercely opposed Yucca Mountain, though a collection of state governments and others are taking legal action to reverse the decision.

Despite his Yucca Mountain decision, President Barack Obama wants to expand nuclear power. He created a commission last year to come up with a long-term nuclear waste plan. Initial findings are expected this summer, with a final plan expected in January.

"They are 13 years late," says Terry Pickens, Director of Nuclear Policy at Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that operates three reactors in Minnesota. Xcel is building steel-and-concrete cask containers to hold old waste on site, and suing the government periodically to pay for them. "We would like them to get done with what they said they would get done."

Some countries -- such as France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom -- reprocess their spent fuel into new nuclear fuel to help reduce the amount of waste.

The remaining waste is solidified into a glass. It needs to be stored in a long-term waste repository, but reprocessing reduces the volume of waste by three-quarters.

Because reprocessing isolates plutonium, which can be used to make a nuclear weapon, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter put a stop to it in the U.S. The ban was later overturned, but the country still does not reprocess.

France produces 1,300 tons of nuclear waste per year, and reprocesses 940 tons. Still, fuel is only reprocessed once and then it, too, needs to be stored. France is expecting that engineers will eventually succeed in building a new type of nuclear reactor called a fast reactor that will use the waste it can't reprocess as fuel.

"They've kicked the can down the road," says Frank von Hippel, a director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.

Other countries, such as Germany, store spent fuel in casks. Finland is building a repository it says will store waste safely for 100,000 years.

Even though there is no long-term storage in the U.S., utility customers and taxpayers have been paying for it -- twice.

Customers have paid $24 billion into a fund Congress established in 1982 to pay for such storage. The charge -- a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours -- would typically add up to about $11 a year for a household that received all its electricity from nuclear plants.

Users pay as taxpayers, too -- for dry storage. Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget.

(This version CORRECTS weight of cask cited, updates with NRC saying plant-specific amounts kept secret for security reasons.)

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More obstacles impede crews in Japan nuke crisis
Emergency crews impeded by mounting obstacles in Japanese nuclear crisis

Kageyama and Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press, On Sunday March 27, 2011, 2:30 pm EDT
TOKYO (AP) -- Mounting problems, including badly miscalculated radiation figures and inadequate storage tanks for huge amounts of contaminated water, stymied emergency workers Sunday as they struggled to nudge Japan's stricken nuclear complex back from the edge of disaster.

Workers are attempting to remove the radioactive water from the tsunami-ravaged nuclear compound and restart the regular cooling systems for the dangerously hot fuel.

The day began with company officials reporting that radiation in leaking water in the Unit 2 reactor was 10 million times above normal, a spike that forced employees to flee the unit. The day ended with officials saying the huge figure had been miscalculated and offering apologies.

"The number is not credible," said Tokyo Electric Power Co. spokesman Takashi Kurita. "We are very sorry."

A few hours later, TEPCO Vice President Sakae Muto said a new test had found radiation levels 100,000 times above normal -- far better than the first results, though still very high.

But he ruled out having an independent monitor oversee the various checks despite the errors.

Officials acknowledged there was radioactive water in all four of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex's most troubled reactors, and that airborne radiation in Unit 2 measured 1,000 millisieverts per hour, four times the limit deemed safe by the government.

Those high airborne readings -- if accurate -- would make it very difficult for emergency workers to get inside to pump out the water.

Officials say they still don't know where the radioactive water is coming from, though government spokesman Yukio Edano earlier said some is "almost certainly" seeping from a damaged reactor core in one of the units.

The discovery late last week of pools of radioactive water has been a major setback in the mission to get the crucial cooling systems operating more than two weeks after a massive earthquake and tsunami.

The magnitude-9 quake off Japan's northeast coast on March 11 triggered a tsunami that barreled onshore and disabled the Fukushima plant, complicating a humanitarian disaster that is thought to have killed about 18,000 people.

A top TEPCO official acknowledged it could take a long time to clean up the complex.

"We cannot say at this time how many months or years it will take," Muto said, insisting the main goal now is to keep the reactors cool.

Workers have been scrambling to remove the radioactive water from the four units and find a place to safely store it. Each unit may hold tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive water, said Minoru Ogoda of Japan's nuclear safety agency.

Safety agency officials had been hoping to pump the water into huge, partly empty tanks inside the reactor that are designed to hold condensed water.

Those tanks, though, turned out to be completely full, said Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Meanwhile, plans to use regular power to restart the cooling system hit a roadblock when it turned out that cables had to be laid through turbine buildings flooded with the contaminated water.

"The problem is that right now nobody can reach the turbine houses where key electrical work must be done," Nishiyama said. "There is a possibility that we may have to give up on that plan."

Despite Sunday's troubles, officials continued to insist the situation had at least partially stabilized.

"We have somewhat prevented the situation from turning worse," Edano told reporters Sunday evening. "But the prospects are not improving in a straight line and we've expected twists and turns. The contaminated water is one of them and we'll continue to repair the damage."

The protracted nuclear crisis has spurred concerns about the safety of food and water in Japan, which is a prime source of seafood for some countries. Radiation has been found in food, seawater and even tap water supplies in Tokyo.

Just outside the coastal Fukushima nuclear plant, radioactivity in seawater tested about 1,250 times higher than normal last week -- but that number had climbed to 1,850 times normal by the weekend.

Nishiyama said the increase was a concern, but also said the area is not a source of seafood and that the contamination posed no immediate threat to human health.

Up to 600 people are working inside the plant in shifts. Nuclear safety officials say workers' time inside the crippled units is closely monitored to minimize their exposure to radioactivity, but two workers were hospitalized Thursday when they suffered burns after stepping into contaminated water. They were to be released from the hospital Monday.

A poll, meanwhile, showed that support for Japan's prime minister had risen amid the disasters.

The poll conducted over the weekend by Kyodo News agency found that approval of Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his Cabinet rose to 28.3 percent after sinking below 20 percent in February, before the earthquake.

Last month's low approval led to speculation that Kan's days were numbered. While the latest figure is still low, it suggests he is making some gains with voters.

About 58 percent of respondents in the nationwide telephone survey of 1,011 people said they approved of the government's handling of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but a similar number criticized its handling of the nuclear crisis.

The death toll from the disasters stood at 10,668 Sunday with 16,574 people missing, police said. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless.

This image released by Japan Ground Self-Defense Force via Kyodo News shows the inside of Unit 4 at the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okumamachi, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, Sunday, March 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Japan Ground Self-Defense Force via Kyodo News) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT, NO LICENSING IN CHINA, HONG KONG, JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA AND FRANCE