Exhausted Japanese engineers scrambled to fix a power cable to two reactors at a tsunami-crippled nuclear power station on Saturday as they fought to prevent a deadly radiation release in the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster.
The dangerous and complex challenge for about 300 workers at the Fukushima plant in northeastern Japan, 240 km north of Tokyo, has unsettled the world’s financial markets and prompted an international reassessment of nuclear safety.
At the plant, from where people within 20 km have been evacuated to avoid radiation, engineers were hoping to attach power lines to two of the six reactors in order to restart water pumps and cool overheated nuclear fuel rods.
Workers also sprayed water on the number three reactor, considered the most critical after steam was seen blowing off, a sign the rods could be becoming exposed.
If those tactics fail, the option of last resort may be to bury the sprawling 40-year-old plant in sand and concrete to prevent a catastrophic radiation release, the method used to seal huge leakages from Chernobyl after a huge blast there.
Japan has raised the severity rating of the nuclear crisis from Level 4 to Level 5 on the seven-level INES international scale, putting it on a par with America’s Three Mile Island accident in 1979, although some experts say it is more serious. Chernobyl was a 7 on that scale.
The operation to avert a large-scale radiation leak has overshadowed the humanitarian aspect of Japan’s toughest moment since World War II, after it was struck last Friday by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a 10-metre tsunami.
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Around 6,500 have been confirmed killed in the double natural disaster, which turned whole towns into waterlogged wastelands, and 10,300 remain missing with many feared dead.
Some 390,000 people, including many among Japan’s ageing population, are homeless and battling near-freezing temperatures in makeshift shelters in northeastern coastal areas.
Obama requests nuclear review, sees risk in Japan
President Barack Obama said on Thursday he had requested a comprehensive review of United States’ nuclear facilities, maintaining his support for atomic energy while seeking to apply lessons from the crisis in Japan.
Obama expressed confidence that Japan would recover from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency that have seemed to overwhelm its government, but said radiation from a stricken plant there posed a “substantial risk” to people nearby.
G-7 sells yen in first concerted action since 2000
The Group of Seven jointly intervened in the foreign exchange market for the first time in more than a decade after Japan’s currency soared, threatening its recovery from the March 11 earthquake.
Japan began the effort, with Europe’s central banks following up in their markets, sending the currency down the most against the dollar since 2008. Japan’s Vice Finance Minister Fumihiko Igarashi said in an interview that he hoped the action would put a floor under the dollar-yen rate. G-7 finance chiefs said in a joint statement after a conference call they will “provide any needed cooperation” with Japan.
Japan disaster caps decades of faked reports, accidents
The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.
The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.