[NEWS] Japan Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear Crisis 2011

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http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/as....html?iref=NS1

Tokyo (CNN) -- An 8.9-magnitude earthquake hit northern Japan on Friday, triggering tsunamis and sending a massive body of water filled with debris that included boats and houses inching toward highways.

The epicenter was 373 kilometers (231 miles) away from the capital, Tokyo, the United States Geological Survey said. But residents there felt the tremors.

The quake rattled buildings and toppled cars off bridges and into waters underneath. Waves of debris flowed like lava across farmland, pushing boats, houses and trailers toward highways.

In Tokyo, crowds gathered in the streets and tried to reach relatives via cell phone.

Scenes inside office buildings showed papers strewn all over the floor and people clinging onto seats and desks.

Such a large earthquake at such a shallow depth creates a lot of energy, said Shenza Chen of the U.S. Geological Survey.

It caused a power outage in about 4 million homes in Tokyo and surrounding areas.

A tsunami in the Pacific was moving closer to other shorelines in other countries, said CNN meteorologist Ivan Cabrera.

It triggered tsunami warnings for various countries, including Japan and Russia, the National Weather Service said.

"Earthquakes of this size are known to generate tsunamis potentially dangerous to coasts outside the source region," it said.

"Based on all available data a tsunami may have been generated by this earthquake that could be destructive on coastal areas even far from the epicenter."

The quake was the latest in a series in the region this week.

Early Thursday, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.3 struck off the coast of Honshu.

A day earlier, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck off of Honshu, the country's meteorological agency said.

The largest recorded quake took place in Chile on May 22, 1960, with a magnitude of 9.5, the USGS said.


UPDATE - 12/3/11.


Walls fall, smoke pours from Japan nuclear plant

SENDAI, Japan – An explosion at a nuclear power station tore down the walls of one building Saturday as smoke poured out and Japanese officials said they feared the reactor could melt down following the failure of its cooling system in a powerful earthquake and tsunami.

It was not clear if the damaged building housed the reactor. Tokyo Power Electric Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, said four workers were injured but details were not immediately available.

Footage on Japanese TV showed that the walls of one building had crumbled, leaving only a skeletal metal frame standing. Puffs of smoke were spewing out of the plant.

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

The trouble began at the plant's Unit 1 after Friday's massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it spawned knocked out power there. The disaster has killed hundreds of people and devastated the country's northeastern coast, where rescuers began slowly arriving Saturday.

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

The official death toll stood at 413, while 784 people were missing and 1,128 injured. In addition, police said between 200 and 300 bodies were found along the coast in Sendai, the biggest city in the area near the quake's epicenter. Local media reports said at least 1,300 people may have been killed.

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

The most troubled one is facing meltdown, officials have said.

Pressure has been building up in the reactor — it's now twice the normal level — and Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters Saturday that the plant was venting "radioactive vapors." Officials said they were measuring radiation levels in the area.

The reactor in trouble has already leaked some radiation: Operators have detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1's control room.

Wind in the region is weak and headed northeast, out to sea, according to the Meteorological Agency.

Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan's nuclear safety commission, said that even if there was a meltdown, it wouldn't affect people outside a six-mile (10-kilometer) radius — an assertion that might need revising if the situation deteriorates. Most of the 51,000 residents living within the danger area had been evacuated, he said.

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

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

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

More than 215,000 people were living in 1,350 temporary shelters in five prefectures, or states, the national police agency said. Since the quake, more than 1 million households have not had water, mostly concentrated in northeast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm waiting for my son to come here. But I cannot tell him he should come over here because mobile phones aren't working," a woman in her 70s told Japanese TV at a shelter in the town of Rikuzentakada, which appeared to be largely destroyed by the tsunami.

"My husband is missing," she said. "Tsunami water was rising to my knees, and I told him I would go first. He is not here yet."

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

Most trains in Tokyo started running again Saturday after the city had been brought to a near standstill the day before. Tens of thousands of people had been stranded with the rail network down, jamming the streets with cars, buses and trucks trying to get out of the city.

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

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

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake

http://www.euronews.net/2011/03/12/e...uclear-reactor


A firefighter looks at burned-out vehicles at Hitachi port, northeastern Japan, on Saturday March 12, 2011, one day after a giant quake and tsunami struck the country's northeastern coast.

UPDATE - 12/3/11.


For battered Japan, a new threat: nuclear meltdown

A meltdown may have occurred at at least one nuclear power reactor in Japan, the country's chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said Sunday, adding that authorities are concerned about the possibility of another meltdown at a second reactor.

"We do believe that there is a possibility that meltdown has occurred. It is inside the reactor. We can't see. However, we are assuming that a meltdown has occurred," he said about the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility.

"And with reactor No. 3, we are also assuming that the possibility of a meltdown as we carry out measures," Edano said.

Edano's comments confirm an earlier report from an official with Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, who said, "we see the possibility of a meltdown."

"There is a possibility, we see the possibility of a meltdown," said Toshihiro Bannai, director of the apan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency international affairs office, in a telephone interview from the agency's headquarters in Tokyo. "At this point, we have still not confirmed that there is an actual meltdown, but there is a possibility."

A meltdown is a catastrophic failure of the reactor core, with a potential for widespread radiation release.

Though Bannai said engineers have been unable to get close enough to the core to know what's going on, he based his conclusion on the fact that they measured radioactive isotopes in the air Saturday night.

"What we have seen is only the slight indication from a monitoring post of cesium and iodine," he said. Since then, he said, plant officials have injected sea water and boron into the plant in an effort to cool its nuclear fuel and stop any reactions.

"We have some confidence, to some extent, to make the situation to be stable status," he said. "We actually have very good confidence that we will resolve this."

A state of emergency has been declared for the plant and two other reactors at the same complex, which holds a total of six reactors, he said. Three are in a safe, shut-down state, he said. "The other two still have some cooling systems, but not enough capacity."

But Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan's ambassador to the United States, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in Washington that he did not know of any evidence of a meltdown.

"We are working on it," he said. "We are getting information every hour on this issue."

And Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, raised another possible issue. "Some of the readings in the measurement equipment were not accurate," he said without elaboration.

He noted that since the inside of the pressure vessel has been filled with sea water, radiation levels in the area have not risen, implying that the problem was not worsening.

The detection of a cesium isotope indicates that the nuclear fuel cladding has failed, said Ken Bergeron, a physicist and former scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.

"Now we have to hope that the containment building will succeed in preventing major amounts of radioactivity" from escaping, he said.

As of Sunday morning, winds in northeast Japan were blowing out to sea at 5-15 mph, said CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward. But they were expected to reverse direction by Monday night, he said. The Daiichi plant is located about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

"We're in uncharted territory," Bergeron said. "We're in the land where probability says we shouldn't be and we're hoping that all the barriers to release radioactivity will not fail."

"The bottom line is that we just don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of days and, frankly, neither do the people who run the system," said Dr. Ira Helfand, a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

What we do know, he added, is that Japan's nuclear facilities are "way out of whack."

The use of sea water and boron was described as a "Hail Mary pass" by Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies focused on energy policies and a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy.

"My understanding is that the situation has become desperate enough that they apparently don't have the capability to deliver fresh water or plain water to cool the reactor and stabilize it and now, in an act of desperation, are having to resort to diverting and using sea water," he said.

Boron, a chemical element, was being added to the water "to sort of stymie other potential nuclear reactions," he said.

Boron has the ability to absorb neutrons, the sub-atomic particles that occur in the nucleus of all atoms. In a nuclear reactor, it is essential that just the right number of neutrons are present. Too many neutrons can cause a fission reaction to get out of control. Too few neutrons and a fission reaction stops.

But, he acknowledged Sunday to reporters in a conference call, "There's a lot that we don't know about what's happening with these reactors. It's trying to piece together a picture where you're dealing with just a few pieces of the puzzle."

Another expert said enough was known to conclude that the nuclear events in Japan rank high on the list of similar incidents. "If this accident stops right now, it will already be one of the three worst accidents we have ever had at a nuclear power plant in the history of nuclear power," said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear materials and president of the U.S.-based Ploughshares Fund, a firm involved in security and peace funding.

He said only the 1979 partial meltdown of a reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union were worse.

If the effort to cool the nuclear fuel inside the reactor fails completely -- a scenario experts who have spoken to CNN say is unlikely -- the resulting release of radiation could cause enormous damage to the plant or release radiation into the atmosphere or water. That could lead to widespread cancer and other health problems, experts say.

The problems reported at two other reactors in the complex stemmed from a similar cause: an insufficient amount of water being pumped into the cores in an attempt to keep them cool.

To ease the pressure inside reactor No. 3, air containing "some minimal radioactive material" was being vented from its containment vessel, Edano said, expressing confidence in the outcome. "We believe that we can stabilize the situation of the reactor," he said.

An evacuation order affected more than 200,000 people living within 20 kilometers of the plants, officials said.

Some experts said the flow of information from the agency has not been fast enough.

But IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano defended the Japanese response. "I know the Japanese authorities are working their hardest to gather the necessary details and ensure safety under difficult and constantly evolving circumstances," he said in a statement.

Japanese authorities have classified the event at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 as a level 4 "accident with local consequences" on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale intended to communicate to the public the significance of radiation-linked events. The scale runs from 0 to 7, with the latter being classified as a major accident.

On Saturday night, three patients at a hospital tested positive for radiation exposure, according to the Japanese public broadcasting station NHK, citing a statement from Fukushima Prefecture.

The three had been randomly selected from a group of 90 hospital workers and patients who were outside the hospital -- about three kilometers from the Daiichi plant -- awaiting evacuation at the time of the explosion. The patients had already been hospitalized at the medical facility prior to Friday's quake.

While the three showed signed of exposure, "no abnormal health conditions have been observed," NHK quoted the prefecture as saying.

Meanwhile, two experts from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission with expertise in boiling-water nuclear reactors like those affected by the disaster have been sent to Japan as part of a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) team.

The NRC's Maryland-based headquarters operations center has been operating round the clock since the beginning of the emergency.

The Japanese government was preparing to distribute iodine tablets to residents, the IAEA said. Iodine is commonly recommended to block the uptake by the thyroid gland of radioactive iodine.

The problems at the Daiichi plant began Friday when the 8.9-magnitude quake struck off the eastern shore of Miyagi Prefecture. The quake forced the automatic shutdown of the plant's nuclear reactors and knocked out the main cooling system, according to the country's nuclear agency.

A tsunami resulting from the quake then washed over the site, knocking out backup generators that pumped water into the reactor containment unit to keep the nuclear fuel cool, according to the agency.

As pressure and temperatures rose inside the reactors at the Daiichi and Daini plants, authorities ordered the release of valves at the plants -- a move that experts said was likely done to release growing pressure inside as high temperatures caused water to boil and produce excess steam.

As crews were working to pump additional water into the reactor containment unit to lower the temperature, the pumping system failed, Edano said, causing the explosion that injured four workers and bringing down the walls of the building containing the reactor.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, citing Japanese authorities, said the explosion occurred outside the plant's primary containment vessel and that the vessel remained intact. The explosion injured four workers, it said.

Nine residents near the site of the explosion got radioactive material on their clothing and were being decontaminated, Bergeron said. "Now, we're trying to make sure they have not been internally exposed to radioactive material."

He described their exposure as "not hazardous to health."

The team then reverted to the plan to flood the reactor with sea water, which Edano said would lower the temperature to acceptable levels. That work began Saturday night and was expected to take two days, Edano said.

Japan is heavily dependent on nuclear power, with 54 plants and another eight slated for construction, said Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action, an environmental group. All are located in "very seismic" areas, she said

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv#..._medium=social

Police: Deaths in Japan's Miyagi may pass 10,000

TOKYO – Police in Japan's northeastern Miyagi prefecture say they estimate that the death toll in Miyagi alone will likely exceed 10,000. Miyagi is one of the areas worst affected by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit Friday.

Miyagi police spokesman Go Sugawara said Sunday that the prefecture's police chief told a gathering of disaster relief officials that his estimate for deaths in the prefecture was more than 10,000.

There were only 379 officially confirmed deaths in Miyagi out of a total of 801 as of Sunday afternoon.


Woman, 70, found alive 4 days after Japan tsunami

SOMA, Japan – Rescuers have found a 70-year-old woman alive four days after the disaster struck.

Osaka fire department spokesman Yuko Kotani says the woman was found inside her house that was washed away by the tsunami in northeastern Japan's Iwate prefecture. The rescuers from Osaka, in western Japan, were sent to the area for disaster relief.

Kotani said the woman was conscious but suffering from hypothermia and is being treated at a hospital. She would not give the woman's name.

Her rescue was a rare bit of news for Japanese traumatized by the disaster.