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Japanese nuclear disaster

The World Health Organisation said that the detection of radiation in food after an earthquake damaged a Japanese nuclear plant was a more serious problem than it had first expected.

"Quite clearly it's a serious situation," Peter Cordingley, Manila-based spokesman for WHO's regional office for the Western Pacific, told Reuters.

"It's a lot more serious than anybody thought in the early days when we thought that this kind of problem can be limited to 20 to 30 kilometres," he said.

Cases of contaminated vegetables, dust, milk and water are already stoking regional anxieties despite Japanese officials' assurances the levels are not dangerous.

Official from Japan's nuclear safety agency told AFP:

Radiation monitoring will be conducted for seawater. There is a possibility that a very small amount of radiation may flow into the sea. But even if it happens, considering the current radiation level in the air, there will not be an impact on human health.
 
62-metre Chinese snorkel to pump water in Fukushima nuclear plant

China on Monday rushed a heavy duty truck fitted with a 62-meter high snorkel and a pump to directly shower water into the damaged reactors of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The snorkel, one of the longest in the world was being shipped to Osaka port, the nearest port to Fukushima plant from Shanghai on Tuesday morning, China state broadcaster CCTV reported. It is being sent at the request of Japan [ Images ].

The ship carrying the snorkel truck was expected to reach Osaka port by Wednesday and from there it would be immediately sent Fukushima which was few hours away, an official of Samy, the company which made the snorkel and the pump said. It is being sent a donation from the company, he said.

The company is also dispatching few staff members to train the Japanese engineers to handle it. The snorkel could directly pump water right into the damaged reactor from a safe distance.

Japanese officials used several fire engines to shoot water into the reactors. Besides problems in reaching the top of the reactors, the fire engines had to go close to the reactors exposing the staff to very high levels of radiation.

The Japanese officials also unsuccessfully tried to dump water using helicopters. Both methods were found to be partially successful. The snorkel and pump was expected to pump large quantities of water to cool down the reactors.

62-metre Chinese snorkel on way to Fukushima plant - Rediff.com India News
 
An interactive guide to nuclear containment

[video]http://gu.com/p/2nn5j[/video]
 
21 March 2011 Last updated at 15:05 GMT
Japan nuclear crisis 'will be overcome', says IAEA

The situation at Japan's quake-damaged nuclear plant remains very serious, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog said.

But IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano said he had "no doubt that this crisis will be effectively overcome".

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant have been battling to cool reactors and spent fuel ponds to avoid a large-scale release of radiation.

Meanwhile, the death toll from the quake and tsunami has risen to 8,450, with nearly 13,000 people missing.

'Positive developments'
The Fukushima plant was crippled by fire and explosions after the 11 March quake and tsunami.

Electricity has been restored to three of six reactors and engineers hope to test water pumps soon.

Earlier, some workers were temporarily evacuated from the complex after grey smoke was seen rising from the No 3 reactor.

Reports said the smoke appeared to have come from a pool where the reactor's spent fuel rods were kept.

Radiation levels did not appear to have risen significantly though after the smoke was spotted, the IAEA and Japan's nuclear safety agency said.

White smoke was later seen rising from the No 2 reactor.

"The crisis has still not been resolved and the situation at the [plant] remains very serious," Mr Amano, the head of the IAEA, told an emergency board meeting.

But he said he was starting to see positive developments; the cooling system had been restored to reactors 5 and 6, and they "are no longer an immediate concern".

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission - whose staff are in Tokyo conferring with the Japanese government and industry officials - said the Japanese nuclear crisis appeared to be stabilising.


The NRC said that reactors 1, 2 and 3 had some core damage but their containment was not currently breached.

Meanwhile, the government has ordered a halt to some food shipments from four prefectures around the Fukushima nuclear plant, as concern increases about radioactive traces in vegetables and water supplies.

Villagers living near the plant have been told not to drink tap water because of higher levels of radioactive iodine.

The suspension - which the government said was just a precaution - applies to spinach from the prefectures of Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma, as well as milk from Fukushima.

Over the weekend spinach and milk produced near the nuclear plant was found to contain levels of radioactive iodine far higher than the legal limits.

However, senior government official Yukio Edano told a news conference that eating or drinking the contaminated food would not pose a health hazard. "I would like you to act calmly," he said.

The World Health Organization said it had no evidence of contaminated food reaching other countries. However, China, Taiwan and South Korea have announced plans to toughen checks of Japanese imports.

Bad weather forced Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan to cancel a planned visit to emergency workers near the Fukushima plant.

It is also making the recovery work a much more difficult task.

Search-and-relief efforts in the prefecture of Miyagi, where the police chief believes the final quake-tsunami death toll could reach 15,000, have been delayed by driving rain.

"We basically cannot operate helicopters in the rain," Miyagi official Kiyohiro Tokairin said.

"We have been using helicopters to deliver relief goods to some places but for today we have to switch the delivery to places that we can reach by road," he said.

More than 350,000 people are still living in evacuation centres in northern and eastern Japan.

There are shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine in the shelters, officials say.

Some aid from foreign countries has started to arrive, and the government has started the process of finding temporary housing in other parts of the country for those made homeless.

Workers in north-east Japan have begun building temporary homes for the displaced. The prefabricated metal boxes with wooden floors were put up on the hillside near the devastated town of Rikuzentakata.

Nearly 900,000 households are still without water.

In a rare piece of good news, an 80-year-old woman and her grandson were found alive on Sunday in the rubble of their home in Ishinomaki city, where they were trapped for nine days.
 
FUKUSHIMA UPDATE

Reactor 1: Damage to the core from cooling problems. Building holed by gas explosion. Power lines attached.

Reactor 2: Damage to the core from cooling problems. Building holed by gas blast; containment damage suspected. Power lines attached.

Reactor 3: Damage to the core from cooling problems. Building holed by gas blast; containment damage possible. Spent fuel pond partly refilled with water after running low.

Reactor 4: Reactor shut down prior to earthquake. Fires and explosion in spent fuel pond; water level partly restored.

Reactors 5 & 6: Reactors shut down. Temperature of spent fuel pools now lowered after rising high.


Analysis

Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News

Technicians at the Fukushima plant are now battling with damage inflicted to electrical systems by the tsunami - and possibly by the earthquake that preceded it, and the gas explosions that subsequently rocked some of the reactor buildings.

Mains electricity has now arrived at three buildings, and at least in one it has been succesfully connected to water pumps.

Some of the circuitry that distributes power around the site has been damaged, and it may be some days before all pumps and all instruments can be connected.

Some key information - such as the water temperature in some of the spent fuel ponds - is still missing, perhaps because instruments were destroyed by fire.

Nevertheless, the power station is undeniably more stable than at any time last week, and for the first time the International Atomic Energy Agency says it 'has no doubt' that the crisis will be overcome.
 
Salute to those who risked and likely gave their life to reconnect power to the pumps. That's about the only thing that's made a tangible difference thus far.
 
Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power
Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 19.43 GMT

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
 
The truth about the Fukushima 'nuclear samurai'
Japan's 'nuclear samurai' are risking their lives to avert catastrophe, but many are manual labourers unequal to the task

Suzanne Goldenberg in Yonezawa guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 18.23 GMT

To a world that doesn't know him, Shingo Kanno is one of the "nuclear samurai" – a selfless hero trying to save his country from a holocaust; to his family, Kanno is a new father whose life is in peril just because he wanted to earn some money on the side doing menial labour at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

A tobacco farmer, Kanno had no business being anywhere near a nuclear reactor – let alone in a situation as serious as the one that has unfolded after the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

His great-uncle, Masao Kanno, said: "People are calling them nuclear samurai because people are sacrificing their lives to try to fix a leak. But people like Shingo are amateurs: they can't really help. It shouldn't be people like Shingo."

Masao Kanno is one of more than 500 people camped out on the hardwood floors of a sports centre in Yonezawa. The homes of most of them lie within 19 miles of the Fukushima plant. They worked at the plant, have family members who did, or passed it daily on the way to work or school.

Before, they rarely thought about the down side to that proximity; now it rules their lives. Many of their homes are inside the evacuation zone, with radiation 17 times higher than background levels and tap water too contaminated to drink.

Those with a close personal connection to the crisis, like Masao Kanno, are moved and grateful for the personal courage of the 500 or so workers still at the plant. But where Japan's prime minister and others have conjured up cardboard heroes, he sees a flesh-and-blood relation.

Shingo Kanno, who had been hired to do construction work, was released from his duties at Fukushima soon after the declaration of a nuclear emergency. As the crisis at the plant worsened, and the Japanese government widened the evacuation zone, he moved his wife and his infant daughter to his in-laws, where they would be safer.

He also helped evacuate his extended family from their home town of Minamisoma, which is within the 30km exclusion zone, to the sports centre and other shelters. Then, his relatives say, Kanno got a call from the plant asking him to go back to work.

His whole family took turns getting on the phone to tell him not to go. They reminded him that he was a farmer, not a nuclear engineer, that he did not have the skills for such a sophisticated crisis. They said he should think of his responsibilities to his parents and his baby daughter.

"I told him: 'You have a family now. You shouldn't be thinking about the company – you should be thinking about your own family,'" said Masao Kanno.

But on Friday Shingo Kanno went back anyway. The family have not heard from him since.

In the meantime, the cult of the nuclear samurai has only grown. Japanese television aired an interview with a plant worker on Monday offering a harrowing insider's account of the struggle for the reactors.

The worker, his face hidden from view, described sirens blaring, billowing smoke, explosions so powerful the earth rumbled, water sloshing in the pool of spent atomic fuel. Then he touched on his own complicated emotions before pulling out of the plant. "The people left behind – I feel really sorry for them," the worker said. "It was a hard decision to make, but I had a strong feeling that I wanted to get out."

Such scenes stir powerful emotions in this sports centre, where evacuees are re-examining their own relationship with the Fukushima plant.

"I think you could say those nuclear workers have been brainwashed," said Keiichi Yamomoto, who used to visit the plant regularly for business. "Japanese people are used to focusing their whole lives on their company, and their company takes priority over their own lives."

He said the power company had a policy of locating nuclear facilities in sparsely populated areas with little local industry. Local people got jobs; the power company was able to increase its supply of electricity for Tokyo.

The Japanese government assented to the Fukushima plant; the prefecture government assented to it; even local people assented to the plant, when they took jobs as inspectors there, Yamomoto said. "It was a trade-off."

Now they are experiencing the consequences of that assent.

People who built their lives around the nuclear plant without ever fully acknowledging its presence are now signing up for text updates of radiation readings from their home town.

Some evacuees in the sports hall say they cannot rely on the power company to give them accurate information. They are going to wait for the Japanese government to issue an all-clear before they consider returning home.

Others are wondering whether they are also somehow culpable in the disaster. Yoshizo Endo moved to live near the plant in 1970, when he became one of the first workers at the then newly opened Fukushima.

He spent more than 20 years as an inspector, undergoing regular safety exercises: fire drills, earthquake evacuations. But, he said, they never contemplated the prospect of a nuclear disaster. "Looking back, it's easy to say now that we should have thought of that," he said.

His wife, Tori, said the crisis at the plant, and the struggle of the nuclear workers, had made her increasingly uncomfortable: her husband had made a good living for years at the plant, and they were living on his pension even now. "I feel guilty," she said.

Had Endo been called, he would have gone too, albeit as part of a team, he said. But he added: "I can't really do anything in this kind of situation. The only thing I know how to do is hold a thermometer."

Did he think the nuclear samurai would succeed in taming the reactors? "What will be will be," said Endo.
 
Setback in cooling of Japan reactors

Japan fears food contamination as battle to cool nuclear plant continues
Abnormal radiation levels reported in tap water, vegetables and milk with concerns that fish may also be affected

Justin McCurry in Osaka
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 10.25 GMT

The operation to cool the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has suffered a setback after smoke and vapour was seen rising from two reactors, as anxiety grew over the safety of food produced in the area.

Water in a pool for storing spent fuel was reaching boiling point, raising the possibility that spent fuel rods could be exposed in turn releasing further radiation, said an official from the nuclear safety agency.

"We cannot leave this alone and we must take care of it as quickly as possible," said the official, Hidehiko Nishiyama.

Days after Japanese authorities reported abnormal levels of radiation in milk, some vegetables and tap water, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said high levels of radioactivity had been found in seawater near the facility, raising fears that seafood has also been contaminated.

The power company said seawater samples contained levels of radioactive iodine 126.7 times the allowed limit, and caesium 24.8 times over. The firm said the quantities posed no immediate threat to health.

"You would have to drink [the seawater] for a whole year just in order to accumulate one millisievert [of radiation]," a Tepco official said. Background radiation from substances in the air and soil generally emit between one and 10 mSv a year.

The source of the contamination has yet to be established, but officials believe it probably came from the tonnes of seawater that have been sprayed over overheating reactors and fuel rod pools in recent days.

The Fukushima prefectural government said no marine products from the region had been distributed after the earthquake. Any evidence that contamination has spread to seafood would add further misery to the region's food producers.

About 6,000 residents of a village near the plant have been told not to drink tap water, while a ban has been imposed on shipments of milk, spinach, and kakina – a leafy vegetable – produced in the area.

The government said it had no plans to extend a 20km (12-mile) evacuation zone around the nuclear plant, despite elevated radiation readings outside the area. "At the moment, there is no need to expand the evacuation area," the government's chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, told a briefing.

The government's latest readings, taken 10km outside the evacuation zone, show radiation levels of 110 microsieverts per hour, higher than normal background levels but well below those deemed a risk to health.

The Kyodo news agency quoted International Atomic Energy Agency data showing that radiation levels 1,600 times higher than normal had been detected in a now-evacuated residential area near the crippled atomic plant.

According to agency inspectors, radiation levels of 161 microsieverts per hour were detected in the town of Namie, about 20km away.

Amid growing concerns over food safety, Japanese authorities are reportedly considering a wider ban on the shipment of certain foodstuffs from the affected region. "They're going to have to take some decisions quickly in Japan to shut down and stop food being used completely from zones which they feel might be affected," Gregory Hartl, a World Health Organisation spokesman, told Associated Press in Geneva.

The WHO said the long-term effects on health from contaminated food was of greater concern that the spread of radioactive particles in the air. "A week ago we were more concerned about purely the radiation leakages and possible explosion of the nuclear facility itself, but now other issues are getting more attention, including the food safety issue," Hartl said.

"Repeated consumption of certain products is going to intensify risks, as opposed to radiation in the air that happens once, and then the first time it rains there's no longer radiation in the air."

The WHO said the spread of radiation into the food supply was more serious than it had first thought, although it added that no tainted products had reached overseas markets.

Japan is an exporter of seafood, fruit and vegetables, and dairy products, with Hong Kong, China and the US its biggest markets. China, Taiwan and South Korea said they would tighten screening of Japanese imports.

Workers at the Fukushima plant have attached power cables to all six reactors and started pumping water into one of them in an attempt to prevent overheating fuel rods from reaching the potentially catastrophic meltdown phase.

"There are signs of light that we are getting out of this crisis," the prime minister, Naoto Kan, was quoted as saying.

But that optimism was tempered by the sight of what appeared to be steam rising from the No 2 reactor and smoky haze above the No 3 reactor. The latter has given particular cause for concern because it contains plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel – or MOX – and would release highly toxic plutonium in the event of a meltdown.

Tepco officials said the emissions had temporarily halted work to cool off the reactors.

The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami continued to rise on Tuesday, as more bodies were retrieved from the vast stretch of coastline hit by the tsunami. Police said 8,928 people had been confirmed dead and a further 12,664 were missing. Various estimates have put the current death toll at nearer 18,000.
 
Japan’s Disaster Brings China-Japan Relations Closer – Analysis

Written by: IDSA



By R N Das

At times succour in adversity can open up fresh avenues to normalise strained relations between two countries locked in distrust and enmity. This seems to be happening between China and Japan in the wake of disaster that befell Japan recently.

Six months ago, the arrest by the Japanese coast guard of the captain of a Chinese fishing vessel, had created a fresh bout of tension between the two countries. In an exercise in ‘coercive diplomacy’, China threatened to stop supplies of rare earths, key ingredients in the manufacture of computer chips, to Japan if the Chinese national was not freed. In yet another incident, that was not widely publicised, on March 8, 2011, just before the earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan, a dispute broke out between the two countries on exploration rights over Chunxia, an oil and gas field in the East China Sea.

The relationship between China and Japan took a positive turn, however, in the wake of the devastating earthquake and the accompanying tsunami that hit Eastern Japan. China acted swiftly to come to the rescue of Japan in a spirit of solidarity. Moreover, the Chinese Government also appealed to the international community to help Japan prevent the nuclear crisis from worsening. Beijing sent a 15-member international rescue team to Japan and provided 30 million Yuan worth of emergency humanitarian assistance. China has already delivered the first relief package consisting of 2,000 blankets, 900 cotton tents and 200 emergency lights. It has also pledged 20,000 tonnes of fuel, 10,000 tonnes of gasoline and 10,000 tonnes of diesel. In the latest round of relief, China moreover delivered ten tonnes of bottled drinking water to the earthquake-hit areas. At Tsinghua University, students set up two donation boxes, one for Yunan where 25 people died recently in an earthquake and the other for Japan’s quake and tsunami victims. All these are examples of how empathy brings people together.

The catastrophe in Japan has brought about a change in the attitude of the people of China towards their Japanese counterparts. According to polls conducted in 2010 by the Japanese newspaper Yamiuri Shimbun and the Chinese news agency Xinhua, 81 per cent of those polled in China said ties with Japan were bad and 79 per cent said that Japan cannot be trusted. But this attitude changed for the better after Japan’s tragedy. In a recent survey conducted by the news portal ifeng.com, nearly 80 per cent of Chinese respondents said that they support their government’s efforts to aid Japan despite friction between the two neighbours. Out of 1.5 million respondents, the survey showed that 1.2 million backed the government’s humanitarian aid to Japan and agreed that China should offer help despite historical and existing disputes. One citizen commented on the website that “human beings are without borders when facing natural disasters.”[fn]China Daily, March 18, 2011.[/fn]

Sounding a note of empathy, an opinion piece in China Daily entitled, “Facing Disasters, We are All Human,” stated, “the tsunami in Japan is yet another, albeit different, test put before us. Bearing our recent history in mind, we often view each other with ambivalent attitudes, to say the least. But the candles lit, the vigils held and the tears shed for the ordinary lives have told a totally different, yet not unexpected, story, which is particularly comforting.”China Daily, March 16, 2011.

Taking the new-found warmth further, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, while participating at the fifth trilateral meeting of foreign ministers of Japan, China and South Korea held in Kyoto on March 19, 2011, said that China will extend maximum support to cooperate with Japan in the relief operations and construction work, and expressed the hope that Japan will overcome the nuclear crisis as soon as possible. In his condolence message, Yang Jiechi noted that the Chinese people were deeply affected by the earthquake since China had experienced a devastating earthquake in Sichuan province three years earlier. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that many Chinese nationals living in Japan also took part in the relief work in Japan. In a bizarre incident, a Japanese official who helped 20 Chinese students escape from the Tsunami himself fell prey to the surging waves while attempting to save his wife and daughter.

Will kindred human spirit and neighbourly gestures have a lasting effect on the strained bilateral relations between China and Japan?

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses) at Japan's Disaster Brings Sino-Japanese Relations Closer | Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
 
Japan nuclear plant workers in hospital after radiation exposure
Three cable-layers at Fukushima power plant exposed to high levels of radiation after stepping into contaminated water

Justin McCurry in Tokyo
The Guardian, Friday 25 March 201

The dangers facing workers battling to avert disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were underlined on Thursday when three men were exposed to high levels of radiation after stepping in contaminated water.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), admitted that the workers had not measured radioactivity levels before beginning work, and that two, who are being treated for radiation burns, were not wearing protective boots.

The two more seriously injured men were diagnosed with possible beta ray burns and were due to be taken to a special unit at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, east of Tokyo, Japan's nuclear safety agency said.

The injuries are similar to regular burns, but can lead to serious complications over a period of several weeks.

Tests on the workers, who are all in their 20s and 30s, showed they were exposed to between 170 millisieverts (mSv) and 180 mSv of radiation while laying cable in the basement of the No 3 reactor's turbine building. That is above the usual legal limit of 100 mSv per year for nuclear power workers in Japan, but below a new limit of 250 mSv, introduced soon after the nuclear crisis began to enable them to spend more time inside the crippled facility.

The two hospitalised men, employees of a Tepco affiliate, were part of a team of six workers attempting to connect a water pump to the power supply and restart the supply of fresh water in an attempt to cool the reactor. Workers in the first and basement floors of the No 3 reactor's turbine building were ordered to evacuate the area after the accident.

Japan's nuclear safety agency said water had probably seeped through their protective clothing, allowing radioactive materials to stick to their skin, as they stood in a 15cm-deep puddle. The two injured men were wearing shoes, while the third had boots on and so escaped serious injury.

Radiation levels on the surface of the puddle were later measured at 400 mSv per hour, while the level in the air reached 200 mSv per hour.

The source of the water was not immediately clear. Tepco said no puddle had been spotted in the turbine building the previous day. Fire trucks have been dousing the reactor in recent days in an attempt to cool a storage pool for spent fuel rods.

The accident cast doubt on Tepco's ability to properly monitor radioactivity at the site. "This kind of exposure, from water, was unforeseen," the government's chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, told reporters.

"Atmospheric radiation levels are monitored constantly, but in this case the workers stepped into water. We are trying to find out exactly what happened so we can ensure it doesn't happen again."

Edano said the injuries were "very regrettable", but defended the health ministry's decision to raise the exposure limit for teams of workers soon after the start of the world's worst nuclear power emergency since Chernobyl.

"The decision to increase permissible radiation exposure was taken on the advice of experts, who say that workers are able to withstand up to 250 mSv per year before radiation has an effect on their health," Edano said.

He conceded that the emergency at Fukushima would lead to a review of Japan's heavy dependence on nuclear power. "It is certain that public confidence in nuclear power plants has greatly changed," Edano told Reuters. "In light of that, we must first end this situation and then study from a zero base."

More than 20 workers have been injured at the Fukushima plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo, since it was badly damaged in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. They include 11 who were hurt when the No 3 reactor building exploded.

To date, 17 have been exposed to radiation exceeding 100 mSv at the plant, though none has been exposed to contamination exceeding the accumulative 250 mSv limit.

The condition of the No 3 unit is of particular concern as it contains plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel and would release highly toxic plutonium in the event of a meltdown.

On Wednesday afternoon, workers were temporarily evacuated from the plant after black smoke was seen rising from the same reactor. The smoke receded after an hour and radiation levels remained unchanged, the safety agency said.

The release of radioactive substances from the plant continued to cause anxiety in Tokyo. Wednesday's warning that radioactive iodine levels in the capital's tap water had exceeded levels considered safe for babies prompted a rush of people buying bottled water.

The warning was lifted on Thursday after iodine-131 dropped to safe levels, but they were still above the safe upper limit for infants in the neighbouring prefectures of Chiba and Saitama.

In Tokyo, a city of 13 million people, supermarkets quickly ran out of bottled water; the metropolitan government said it would distribute an extra 240,000 bottles to families with infants.

"Customers ask us for water, but there's nothing we can do," Masayoshi Kasahara, a supermarket worker, said. "We have asked for extra deliveries but we don't know when they will arrive."
 
The evacuation zone has been increased to 30 km radius.
 
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