Japan spent another agonising day absorbing the risks from a deepening crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, apocalyptic scenes of destruction along the country’s northeastern coast and an increasingly bleak official reckoning of a human toll now judged to be in excess of 10,000.
After a third day of monumental struggles to control the overheating reactors, Yukio Edano, the Government’s top spokesman, admitted the possibility that the Fukushima plant could experience a second big explosion on a scale of the one which blew the roof off the No1 reactor building yesterday.
At one point, senior Government officials indicated that the No 3 reactor at Fukushima had already begun the process of a partial meltdown, but they later said that they thought the reactor was in a more stable state because water around the previously exposed fuel rods had since been brought back to acceptable levels.
In an emergency press conference, Banri Kaeda, the Economy Minister, declared a severe electricity shortage and called on both industry and households to conserve as much power as possible across the whole northern part of the county.
In the capital, residents and businesses were warned of rolling power blackouts from Monday as drivers reported that petrol stations across central Tokyo had run out of fuel.
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All this came amid a constant battering of powerful aftershocks which shook buildings and increased the risks to rescue workers. The Japan Meteorological Agency calculated that the risk of a quake of at least of 7.0 magnitude hitting in the same place as Friday’s over the next three days was 70 per cent.
Hugely amplifying the misery was the rollercoaster flow of updates from the nuclear power plant 150 miles (241km) north of Tokyo in Fukushima: a series of modest victories and larger setbacks as engineers strained to prevent major radiation leakage from two malfunctioning reactors.
In-patients at a hospital within the 10km evacuation zone outside the plant were found to have suffered exposure to elevated levels of radiation.
As the battle to control the temperature of two reactors continued, the Government said that a “very small” quantity of radioactive substance had leaked from the No 3 reactor. In a sign of growing concern at the prospect of radiation blowing towards Tokyo, the Government also established radiation detection units in Ibaraki, one of the prefectures that lies between Fukushima and the capital.
Engineers at a Tohoku Electric nuclear plant 120km north of Fukushima said that their equipment had registered four times the usual levels of radiation for a period yesterday afternoon — because there were no problems with their own reactors, it was assumed to be radioactive material that had blown from Fukushima after the explosion which blew the roof off one of the reactor buildings.
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Efforts to calm the overheating No 1 reactor at Fukushima included injecting fresh water and reducing the pressure with further releases of steam. The top Government spokesman said that although there had been a spike in detected radiation outside the Fukushima plant — a rise that took it more than twice over the allowable level of 500 micro Sievert per hour — radiation had been significantly reduced.
The bid to avert more severe problems with reactor No 1 included pumping seawater into the reactor along with boric acid — measures to prevent criticality in the core.