WASHINGTON — Japanese officials are issuing broad evacuation orders for people living near two nuclear power plants whose cooling systems have collapsed as a result of the earthquake,
The New York Times reported.
Small amounts of radioactive material are now likely to lead from the plants.
The two plants, known as Daiichi and Daini experienced critical failures of the backup generators needed to power cooling systems after the plants were shut down, as they were during the quake.
An estimated 45,000 people are now being evacuated from around the Daiichi plant, where those living within a six-mile radius were told to leave. The evacuation of the second plant was for a one-mile radius because “there is no sign that radiation has been emitted outside,” an official said.
The cooling system failure allowed pressure to build up beyond the design capacity of the reactors. Radioactive vapor was expected to be released into the atmosphere to prevent damage to the containment systems, safety officials said. But officials say that the levels of radiation were not large enough to threaten the health of people outside the plants, and that the evacuations had been ordered merely as a precaution.
Nuclear safety officials focused initially on the Daiichi plant. Both plants are operated by the Tokyo Electric Company. Yet by Saturday morning Japan had declared states of emergency for five reactors at the two plants, an escalation that added to worries about the safety of nuclear facilities in the quake-prone Japanese islands.
The Daiichi and Daini plants are 10 miles apart in Fukushima Prefecture, about 150 miles north of Tokyo and close to the quake’s epicenter off the coast, the Times reported.
A nuclear expert with the Carnegie Endowment told Newsmax that although unlikely, a “deadly plume that we know happened in Chernobyl” could not be ruled out if a meltdown occurs.
Even as Japan fought to cope with the devastating aftermath of a 8.9 level earthquake and the subsequent tsunamis, Japan’s Kyodo news service reported that radiation levels in the control room of the No. 1 plant at TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima facility, had spiked to 1,000 times their normal levels.
Observers speculated that could mean radioactive steam had spread beyond the containment vessel within the facility.
MSNBC.com also reported Friday night that as many as five nuclear reactors at two power plants have lost their ability to maintain low enough temperatures. Engineers and scientists are working around the clock to find a way to lower temperatures inside the reactor cores, before a meltdown and possible explosive release of radiation can occur.
The first reactor to report overheating was Fukushima Daiichi No. 1. But MSNBC reports that TEPCO has since reported its also lost coolant capability at a second Daiichi unit, and at three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site.
Efforts to determine just how dangerous conditions are have been complicated by conflicting information from the Japanese government, which continued to maintain Friday night that no radioactive material had escaped the plant facility. That appeared to be in direct contradiction to other available information.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), for example, said that radiation had been measured at 8 times the normal level during the main gave of reactor No. 1, Kyodo reports.
Also, news releases posted on the Tokyo Electric Power company’s website detailing efforts to cool down the nuclear power cores at the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Station reported elevated radiation levels in the power plants’ vicinity.
The news release posted on the TEPCO site stated: “Measurement of radioactive material (iodine, etc.) by monitoring car indicates increasing value compared to normal level. One of the monitoring posts is also indicating higher than normal level. We will continue monitoring discharge of radioactive material from exhaust stack and discharge canal, etc.”
After Prime Minister Naoto Kan visited the facility, the evacuation zone for nearby residents was expanded from 3 to 10 kilometers.
Japanese officials announced Friday they are considering a plan to vent moderately radioactive water vapor to ease pressure in at least one of the plant’s nuclear containment vessels. Pressure stemming from the intense heat of a nuclear reaction could threaten the integrity of the reactor dome. A breached dome would release radioactive material into the atmosphere. The rupture of a reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986 caused what is generally acknowledged as the worst nuclear power plant accident in history.
Experts say that release of vapor into the atmosphere at Fukushima will almost certainly cause some degree of radioactive contamination to the environment. Most experts say the contamination should be minimal, however, as long as the containment vessel remains intact. The venting of vaporized coolant is intended to protect the containment vessel.
The impact on the Japanese of releasing even mildly radioactive vapor, however, would be difficult for many Americans to comprehend. In Japan the cultural memory of the devastating radiation burns that followed the U.S. atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the Japanese resistance in the Second World War, remains painfully vivid.
NISA officials say the release of pressure will not pose an immediate risk to nearby residents.
Late Friday, reports emerged that as many as three nuclear power plants have experienced cooling system failures.
Details of how the accident happened are only gradually emerging. Not only did the earthquake interrupt the normal power supply that drives the facilities’ cooling pumps, but backup diesel generators were apparently knocked out of action by the subsequent tsunami.
Japanese authorities report workers reportedly have installed to restore emergency power.
Scientists are very nervous about what could happen if the situation at the plants continues to deteriorate.
In an exclusive interview, Newsmax asked Mark Hibbs, the Berlin-based senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonprofit think tank, to evaluate the risk of the nuclear cores reaching meltdown temperature -- the so-called “China syndrome” popularized by the film by that title, which was released in 1979, the same year as the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.
Hibbs, who works in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program, told Newsmax that the worst-case event in Japan would be “the Chernobyl scenario, where the damage to the reactor was such that the integrity of the structures were damaged.
“There was an explosion and other things happened in there, that opened up the reactor so the inventory of radioactive material … went into the atmosphere and generated this deadly plume that we know happened in Chernobyl,” he told Newsmax.
That April 1986 Chernobyl disaster Hibbs sees as an unlikely, worst-case scenario claimed an estimated 4,000 lives. Over 330,000 people had to be relocated due to contamination.
But Hibbs hastened to add: “Nobody is saying that’s going to happen. Nobody is even saying we’re going to have a core meltdown. But we have a window of time now.
“We don’t know how much [time] is left -- but the Japanese authorities and the government and all the agencies that they can muster are working overtime to get cooling systems on that site powered and working.”
Based on European reactor designs he is familiar with, Hibbs estimated Japan has at least 24 hours to avert a meltdown.
“And that’s the absolute challenge of the day,” he said.
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