Japan worked desperately to contain explosions and fires at a damaged nuclear power facility on Tuesday, evacuating all but a few dozen workers, forbidding planes from flying overhead and searching for ways to keep spent fuel rods submerged in water so they would not emit potentially dangerous radiation.
Radiation levels shot up early Tuesday after the third explosion in four days rocked the seaside Fukushima Daiichi complex and fire briefly raged in a storage facility.
Three hours after the explosion, the radiation level at the plant measured 11,930 micro sieverts per hour — several times the amount a person can safely be exposed to in one year.
Radiation levels shrank dramatically within the next six hours, to 496 micro sieverts per hour, which government spokesman Yukio Edano called “much higher than the normal level
. . . but one that causes no harm to human health.”
The levels detected earlier, however, “would certainly have negative effects on the human body,” Edano told the Japanese news service Kyodo.
Toyko Electric Power Co., which owns the facility, said it was considering using a helicopter to douse a storage pond with cold water, an effort to bring down the temperature of the pool, which reportedly has been heated to the boiling point by the spent, radioactive rods.
Hundreds of workers were sent away from the power facility, though about 50 stayed on to fight fires and try to stabilize the plant. Prime Minister Naoto Kan hailed those workers who remained at the plant, who, he said, “are putting themselves in a very dangerous situation.”
Officials from Tokyo Electric said radioactive substances were emitted after an explosion in the unit 2 reactor at 6:14 a.m. (5:14 p.m. Monday in Washington). The blast took place near or in the suppression pool, which traps and cools radioactive elements from the containment vessel, officials said. The explosion appeared to have damaged valves and pipes, possibly creating a path for radioactive materials to escape.
While the fire at the fourth reactor had been extinguished, Japanese officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency that because of the blaze “radioactivity is being released directly into the atmosphere,” the agency said.
Kan, looking grave, told the nation that radiation already had spread from the reactors and there was “still a very high risk of further radioactive material escaping.” He urged people within 12.5 miles to evacuate the area, and said those within 19 miles of the plant should remain indoors.
Higher-than-normal radiation levels were detected in Tokyo, roughly 150 miles from Fukushima. Kanagawa, a prefecture south of Tokyo, recorded radiation at nine times the usual level. In Ibaraki, roughly 70 miles from Tokyo, levels were briefly 100 times the normal measure, according to the Kyodo news agency.
In each case, officials said that exposure to those levels of radiation would not pose an immediate danger to human health.
But many residents said they were deeply worried, and scores of foreign residents of Japan
made plans to leave the country as soon as possible.
A no-fly zone was declared covering a 19-mile radius around the Fukushima Daiichi facility. For most of the day, winds blew in a southeasterly direction, pushing the plume of radioactivity toward the Pacific Ocean.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Japanese authorities said the situation at Fukushima Daiichi had marginally improved — though it remains dangerous. In addition to putting out the fire at unit 4, workers were closer to stabilizing units 1 and 3, keeping the fuel rods under the necessary cooling water. Edano said that it was too early to tell if workers’ emergency cooling efforts are working for unit 2.
“There is no manual to this kind of incident. I believe on the ground things are chaotic,” Takayuki Terai, professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tokyo. “But in essence, they just have to put water into the reactors continuously and cool them down and contain them.”
Amid the four-day-long emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan’s public has grown skeptical about the reliability of official information, criticizing Tokyo Electric officials in particular for their vague answers during news conferences.
Kan himself was not briefed on the Tuesday morning explosion until after it had been reported on television. According to a Kyodo reporter who overheard the conversation, Kan later grilled the company representatives, asking, “What the hell is going on?”
During a midmorning news conference, four Tokyo Electric officials revealed almost no information about the blast.
Japan’s usually deferential news media turned vicious, asking, “What does this mean?”
“We want answers, not apologies,” one reporter said.
Tuesday began with the fire that broke out in a pool storing spent fuel rods at the base of unit 4, which had been shut down for inspection before last Friday’s earthquake. Experts said the fire most likely broke out because the pool water had run low or dry, allowing the rods to overheat. Radioactive substances spewed outside from the fire, officials said, because the structure housing the pool was damaged by Monday’s explosion at unit 3.
Half an hour later, the explosion at unit 2 took place. Experts said that, unlike the two previous explosions that destroyed outer buildings, this explosion might have damaged portions of the containment vessel designed to bottle up radioactive materials in the event of an emergency.
The explosion was followed by a brief drop in pressure in the vessel and a spike in radioactivity outside the reactor to levels more than eight times the recommended limit for what people should receive in a year, the company said. Japanese government officials later said it was unclear whether the spent fuel fire or the explosion had caused the spike in radiation.
The new setbacks came on the heels of a difficult Monday at Fukushima Daiichi unit 2, one of six reactors at the site. Utility officials there reported that four out of five water pumps being used to flood the reactor had failed and that the other pump had briefly stopped working. As a result, the company said, the fuel rods, normally covered by water, were completely exposed for 140 minutes.
That could have grave consequences, worsening the partial meltdown that most experts think is underway. By comparison, in the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in Pennsylvania, it took two hours for half the plant’s nuclear fuel to melt.
According to a report by the Kyodo news agency, the fifth pump was later restarted, and seawater mixed with boron was again injected in a desperate bid to cool the reactor, but the fuel rods remained partially exposed and ultra-hot. On Tuesday morning, Tokyo Electric said that 2.7 meters (3 yards), or less than half, of the rods were still exposed.
The other four pumps were thought to have been damaged by a blast Monday that destroyed a building at the nearby unit 3 reactor, Kyodo reported. That blast, like one on Saturday at unit 1, was caused by a buildup in hydrogen generated by a reaction that took place when the zirconium alloy wrapped around the fuel rods was exposed to steam at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that injections of seawater into units 1 and 3 had been interrupted because of a low level in a seawater supply reservoir, but the seawater injections were later restored.
A commercial satellite photo of the complex showed piles of debris on top of units 1 and 3, which raised new fears about the condition of the pools where spent fuel is stored, especially at unit 1, where a design by General Electric placed the pool on top of the reactor but below the outer structure that was destroyed. In the satellite photo, there was no sign of a large crane that had been sitting on the roof before the blast. The ability of workers to assess the damage was hindered by fears that another explosion might occur.
In March 2010, 1,760 tons of spent fuel was stored in the six pools — 84 percent of capacity, according to Tokyo Electric.
After Monday’s explosion at unit 3, Japanese government officials were quick to assert that it did not damage the core containment structure, and they said there would be little increase in radiation levels around the plant. But the explosion prompted Japan’s nuclear agency to warn those within 12 miles to stay indoors. The blast also injured 11 people, one seriously.
The string of earthquake- and tsunami-triggered troubles at the Fukushima Daiichi plant began Friday, when a loss of grid power (caused by the earthquake) followed by a loss of backup diesel generators (caused by the tsunami) led to the failure of cooling systems needed to keep reactor cores from overheating.
The IAEA reported that Japan has evacuated 185,000 people from towns near the nuclear complex. The agency said Japan has distributed 230,000 units of stable iodine to evacuation centers from the area around the Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear power plants. The iodine has not been administered to residents; the distribution is a precautionary measure. The ingestion of stable iodine can help to prevent the accumulation of radioactive iodine in the thyroid.
The U.S. 7th Fleet said Monday that some of its personnel, who are stationed 100 miles offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, had come into contact with radioactive contamination. The airborne radioactivity prompted the fleet to reposition its ships and aircraft.
Using sensitive instruments, precautionary measurements were conducted on three helicopter aircrews returning to the USS Ronald Reagan after conducting disaster relief missions near Sendai. Those measurements identified low levels of radioactivity on 17 crew members.
The low-level radioactivity was easily removed from affected personnel by washing with soap and water, and later tests detected no further contamination.
The political fallout spread all the way to the United States and Europe. German Chancellor Angel Merkel said Monday that she was suspending a deal that would have extended permits for 17 aging nuclear plants.
Many nuclear experts also called for a tougher scrutiny of U.S. plants, noting that the Japanese nuclear crisis exposed the limits of human ingenuity and imagination and pointed to the possible failure of the best-laid backup plans.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and director of the Nuclear Safety Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a conference call that in certain respects, the U.S. nuclear plants are not as prepared as the Japanese ones for a catastrophic power outage. After the earthquake and tsunami knocked out the electrical grid and backup generators, the Japanese engineers switched to batteries that could last for eight hours, he said.
“In this country, most of our reactors are only designed with battery capacity for four hours,” Lochbaum said. “Many of our reactors are in situation where earthquakes, or hurricanes in the gulf, or ice storms in the northeast, or a tree in Cleveland, can cause an extensive blackout,” he said.
The August 2003 blackout in North America that affected 52 million people across the upper Midwest, New York and parts of Canada was triggered when overheated wires sagged into trees in northeastern Ohio. Nine nuclear units switched to diesel backup generators, which are the size of locomotives without wheels.
Despite the cascade of equipment failures at the Fukushima Daiichi complex, some nuclear experts noted on Monday that the fuel rods there, whose temperature could have risen to as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, would lose some of their heat over the next few days and would probably remain encased, even in the worst-case scenario, in a secondary containment structure with several feet of steel and concrete walls.
But the new explosion raises new questions. With it impossible to see into the reactor vessels, officials were in large part speculating about what is happening inside by using a variety of gauges and indicators.
“Let’s hope they can get these reactors under control,” said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They’re not there yet.”
