Japan: Nuclear Crisis Requires International Cooperation

Friday, March 18 Update

The International Atomic Energy Agency chief says he views Japan's nuclear crisis as an extremely serious accident requiring international cooperation.

IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said Friday that he plans to meet with top Japanese officials and to visit the area struck by the devastating earthquake and tsunami a week ago that knocked out power for the cooling systems at a nuclear power plant, setting off Japan's crisis.

Amano is accompanied by a four-member team of experts. He said: "We see it as an extremely serious accident. The international community is extremely concernced about this issue, and it's important to cooperate in dealing with it."

Japan's military says it does not plan further helicopter air drops of water on overheating reactors at a tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant.

Defense ministry spokesman Ippo Mayama said Friday that further helicopter runs were not planned, following several runs the day before. He did not say why. It was unclear what effect the water drops had on the targeted reactor.

Thursday, March 17th Update

The United States on Wednesday authorized the first evacuations of Americans out of Japan, taking a tougher stand on the deepening nuclear crisis and warning U.S. citizens to defer all non-essential travel to any part of the country as unpredictable weather and wind conditions risked spreading radioactive contamination.

President Barack Obama placed a telephone call to Prime Minister Naoto Kan to discuss Japan's efforts to recover from last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami, and the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant. Obama promised Kan that the U.S. would offer constant support for its close friend and ally, and "expressed his extraordinary admiration for the character and resolve of the Japanese people," the White House said.

But a hastily organized teleconference with officials from the State and Energy Departments underscored the administration's concerns. The travel warning extends to U.S. citizens already in the country and urges them to consider leaving. The authorized departure offers voluntary evacuation to family members and dependents of U.S. personnel in Tokyo, Yokohama and Nagoya and affects some 600 people.

Senior State Department official Patrick Kennedy said chartered planes will be brought in to help private American citizens wishing to leave. People face less risk in southern Japan, but changing weather and wind conditions could raise radiation levels elsewhere in the coming days, he said.

The decision to begin evacuations mirrors moves by countries such as Australia and Germany, who also advised their citizens to consider leaving Tokyo and other earthquake-affected areas. Tokyo, which is about 170 miles from the stricken nuclear complex, has reported slightly elevated radiation levels, though Japanese officials have said the increase was too small to threaten the 39 million people in and around the capital.

Anxious to safeguard the U.S. relationship with its closest Asian ally, Obama told Kan Wednesday evening about the steps the U.S. was taking, shortly before the State Department announced the first evacuations. But the alliance looked likely to be strained, with the U.S. taking more dramatic safety precautions than Japan and issuing dire warnings that contradicted Japan's more upbeat assessments.

Earlier Wednesday, the Obama administration urged the evacuation of Americans from a 50-mile radius of the stricken nuclear plant, raising questions about U.S. confidence in Tokyo's risk assessments. Japan's government was urging people within 20 miles to stay indoors if they could not evacuate.

White House spokesman Jay Carney sought to minimize any rift between the two allies, saying U.S. officials were making their recommendations based on their independent analysis of the data coming out of the region following Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami.

"I will not from here judge the Japanese evaluation of the data," Carney told reporters. "This is what we would do if this incident were happening in the United States."

Until Wednesday, the U.S. had advised its citizens to follow the recommendations of the Japanese government. As late as Tuesday, Carney had said those recommendations were "the same that we would take in the situation."

But conditions at the nuclear plant continued to deteriorate, with surging radiation forcing Japan to order workers to temporarily withdraw. Obama met at the White House with Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who recommended the wider evacuation zone.

During testimony on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Jaczko said anyone who gets close to the plant could face potentially lethal doses of radiation.

"We believe radiation levels are extremely high," he said.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. had consular personnel in the Miyagi and Ibaraki prefectures and was sending officials out to check on Americans.

"We have consular teams on the ground," Toner said. "Where they can, they are going door to door. They are going to hospitals. They are trying everything in their power to reach out and find American citizens."

The Pentagon said U.S. troops working on relief missions can within 50 miles to the plant with approval. Spokesman Col. David Lapan said the U.S. would review requests from the Japanese for assistance that would require troops to move within that radius, though no approval for such movement had been given since the stricter guidelines were enacted.

The Pentagon said troops are receiving anti-radiation pills before missions to areas where radiation exposure is likely.

With the arrival of three more ships to the massive humanitarian mission, there were 17,000 sailors and Marines afloat on 14 vessels in waters off Japan. Several thousand Army and Air Force service members already stationed at U.S. bases in Japan have also been mobilized for the relief efforts.

Airmen have been flying search and rescue missions and operating Global Hawk drones and U-2 reconnaissance planes to help the Japanese assess damage from the disasters. The operation is fraught with challenges - mainly, figuring out how to continue to provide help amid some low-level releases of radiation from the facility, which officials fear could be facing a meltdown.

Weather also temporarily hampered some relief plans Wednesday. Pilots couldn't fly helicopters off the deck of aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan until late afternoon because of poor visibility.

The 7th Fleet said 15 flights with relief supplies were launched from the eight-ship carrier group, about half as many as the 29 flights reported the previous day to deliver food, water, blankets and other supplies.

Several water pumps and hoses were being sent from U.S. bases around Japan to help at Fukushima, where technicians were dousing the overheating nuclear reactors with seawater in a frantic effort to cool them. The U.S. had already sent two fire trucks to the area to be operated by Japanese firefighters, said Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Helicopters dump water to cool reactor in Japan

Helicopters are dumping water on a stricken reactor in northeastern Japan to cool overheated fuel rods inside the core.

The crisis at several reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant were set off when last week's earthquake and tsunami knocked out power needed for their cooling systems and ruined backup generators.

Japanese officials struggling to avoid full meltdowns have raised hopes of easing the crisis, saying they may be close to bringing power back to the plant and restoring the cooling systems.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Wednesday, March 16th Update

Spent fuel rods in Unit 4 of Japan's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been exposed, resulting in the emission of "extremely high" levels of radiation, the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.

"What we believe at this time is that there has been a hydrogen explosion in this unit due to an uncovering of the fuel in the fuel pool," Gregory Jaczko told a House energy and commerce subcommittee hearing. "We believe that secondary containment has been destroyed and there is no water in the spent fuel pool, and we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures."

The water served to both cool the uranium fuel and shield it. But once the uranium fuel was no longer covered by water, its zirconium cladding that encases the fuel rods heated, generating hydrogen, said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former official with the Department of Energy.

That caught fire, resulting in a situation that is "very, very serious," he told CNN. He said the next solution may involve nuclear plant workers having to take heroic acts. Asked to be more specific, he said, "This is a situation where people may be called in to sacrifice their lives. ... It's very difficult for me to contemplate that but it's, it may have reached that point."

Photographs of the building released Wednesday by the power company showed a hole in a wall and deterioration of the roof.

A Japanese Self-Defense Force helicopter aborted its mission to drop water over the reactor because of the high radiation levels in the area, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.

Officials have been working to resolve cooling problems at four of Fukushima Daiichi's six reactors in the wake of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan Friday.

Jaczko said U.S. nuclear officials were monitoring "as best we can" the four reactors. Three of them were operating at the time of Friday's 9.0 earthquake and were shut down following their normal procedures, he said. All of them, he said, appeared to have suffered "some degree of core damage from insufficient cooling caused ultimately by the loss of off-site power and the inability of the on-site diesel generators to operate successfully following the tsunami."

Three reactors were being cooled with seawater and their primary containment vessels were described as "functional," he said.

But core cooling was "not stable" for unit No. 2, he said. Though the primary containment appeared to be functioning, "we believe that the spent fuel pool level is decreasing."

At unit No. 3, he said, the integrity of the spent fuel pool appeared to have been compromised and there may have been a reaction between the zirconium cladding and the water.

Jaczko's grim announcement confirmed fears that the nuclear crisis would worsen. They had already heightened earlier in the day, when officials observed white vapor rising from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's reactor No. 3.

For two other units, an IAEA report indicates that the water in the spent fuel pool was down "a little bit," he said. He had no "significant information" about the final unit.

Tests on tap water in Fukushima city, 80 kilometers (50 miles) away, found radiation, though at levels not harmful to the human body, and later tests showed no radiation in the water, government officials said.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano will travel to Japan "as soon as possible, hopefully (Thursday)," he said Wednesday, to get the latest on the situation and to see how the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency can best help Japanese authorities, he said. He will stay one night, he added.

Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, initially said a breach in the containment vessel -- the steel and concrete shell that insulates radioactive material inside the reactor -- may have been the cause of Wednesday's white vapor. But he said later it was unlikely that the vessel suffered severe damage, the Kyodo news agency reported.

Officials told workers at the plant to evacuate Wednesday after the vapor rose above the plant and radiation levels spiked. Radiation levels later fell, and authorities allowed the workers to return, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said.

The number of nuclear workers remaining on site was slashed Tuesday from 800 to 50 but had grown to 180 by Wednesday afternoon, the power company said.

About 200,000 people living within a 20-kilometer radius of the plant have been evacuated; those living 20 to 30 kilometers from the site have been told to remain inside. Authorities also have banned flights over the area.

But the Japanese precautions were not universally embraced. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo was recommending that U.S. citizens who live within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the plant evacuate or take shelter indoors, U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos said in a statement Wednesday.

"Their standards are different from ours based on how far you should evacuate," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday. He called the situation "very fluid."

That view was confirmed by NRC's Jaczko. "For a comparable situation in the United States, we would recommend an evacuation to a much larger radius than has currently been provided in Japan," he said.

The U.S. military also said it will not allow troops within 50 miles of the plant, Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama was briefed Wednesday by the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the "deteriorating situation" of the damaged nuclear reactors, Carney said.

The weather has emerged as a key concern, but on Wednesday afternoon, winds were blowing out to sea, CNN International Meteorologist Jennifer Delgado said.

Between Units 3 and 4, Japanese authorities said they had measured radiation dose rates of up to 400 millisieverts per hour, IAEA reported Tuesday. That's equivalent to about 2,000 chest X-rays per hour, the agency said on its website. "This is a high dose-level value, but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time," it added.

As a result of the monitoring of about 150 people from around the Daiichi site, 23 have been decontaminated, IAEA said.

"Their situation is not great," said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. "It's pretty clear that they will be getting very high doses of radiation. There's certainly the potential for lethal doses of radiation. They know it, and I think you have to call these people heroes."

A meltdown occurs when nuclear fuel rods cannot be cooled and melt the steel and concrete structure containing them. In the worst-case scenario, the fuel can spill out of the containment unit and spread radioactivity through the air and water. That, public health officials say, can cause both immediate and long-term health problems, including radiation poisoning and cancer.