The unfolding nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power plant created a fourth day of alarm on Monday as a hydrogen explosion obliterated the walls and roof of a reactor building.
While still playing down the overall risk of any harmful contamination leaving the plant in large quantities, officials warned people still within the 12 mile (20km) exclusion radius of the plant — mostly hospital patients and staff — to remain indoors.
The shuddering blast at the Fukushima No 3 reactor occurred against the bleak backdrop of a rapidly escalating humanitarian disaster and the discovery of 2,000 bodies washed on to the shore of Miyagi prefecture. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless, evacuated and without stable supplies of food, power and water.
Many others are thought to be cut off from rescuers, stranded in devastated villages surrounded by water or impenetrable walls of rubble. A few were able to use their last moments of mobile phone battery to send twitter pleas for help: “Most of the houses along the beach have been washed up. I’m on the second floor but the roads are already sunk, help me,” wrote one in Watari town.
Throughout the day, an endless stream of twitter messages pleaded with anyone listening to send rescuers to their relatives and friends in the stricken areas.
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One begged emergency services to head to Oshima with food, medicine and firefighting equipment. Another, written from an evacuation centre in Chiba, described the sight of a high school student reassuring an old man that Japan would one day recover: “Don’t worry, it will be better when we have grown up,” he said, “at least we have a future.”
Collected estimates from police throughout the northeastern area of Japan suggest the quake and tsunami may have claimed far more than 10,000 lives. Emergency services reaching the Oshika Peninsula said that they were finding at least 100 bodies on each of ten beaches they reached throughout the day.
Rescue efforts were carried out amid increasingly difficult conditions including an impending national shortage of oil and petrol, threatened power blackouts and the heart-stopping chill of regular aftershocks. At one point, a false alarm of another huge tsunami sent rescue workers and evacuees scrambling for higher ground through the wreckage of cars and homes.
Mid-morning, a quake with magnitude over 6.0 struck off the coast of Ibaraki prefecture, to the south of the troubled nuclear plant in Fukushima.
The operator of the plant, which had warned yesterday that a blast looked increasingly possible, said early in the afternoon that radiation levels detected there were within legal limits.
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As part of their titanic struggle to prevent the power plant at Fukushima plunging the quake-ravaged north of Japan into a deeper nuclear crisis, engineers had been pumping seawater into the malfunctioning reactor since yesterday in an unorthodox bid to cool it down. That process was temporarily suspended earlier today, leading to a build-up of pressure and radiation.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) later indicated that the explosion, while spectacular and causing the injury of at least seven people working at the plant, had not compromised the core container — the critical factor standing between the release of small quantities of radioactive materials and a more sinister environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile the financial markets delivered their predictably volatile take on the situation. Despite huge disruption to commuter services and instructions by many companies that their staff remain at home, Tokyo trading floors opened as usual today to provide investors with their first real opportunity to respond to Friday’s quake.
Japanese stocks — especially anything associated with the nuclear or rail industries — were sold with vehemence, lopping 6.38 per cent from the Nikkei 225 Index and causing yen to weaken against the US dollar.
In a move designed to pre-empt a crisis in the financial system, the Bank of Japan took the unprecedented move of injecting Y12 trillion in additional liquidity in an effort to lend stability to the situation.