Latest Updates on Japan’s Nuclear Crisis and Earthquake Aftermath

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

By ROBERT MACKEY

Live TV : Ustream














A live stream of video from NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, with simultaneous English translation. (Click the play button at lower left to watch the video on this blog.) On Wednesday, The Lede continues to supplement reporting from our colleagues in Japan on the aftermath of a devastating 9.0 earthquake, including efforts to regain control of a damaged nuclear plant. Updates below feature reports from other news sites and firsthand accounts and video posted on social networks. A Twitter stream in the right column of this blog includes messages from journalists and officials in Japan.

Tepco/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A Tokyo Power and Electric Company photograph showing extensive damage to the buildings housing reactor No. 3, left, and reactor No. 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant on Wednesday.

Japan’s Kyodo News reports that the U.S. military plans to deploy “a Global Hawk unmanned high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, possibly on Thursday, to take images of the inside of the building that houses the No. 4 reactor, according to Japanese government sources.”

That seems to be in line with reported concerns from the Pentagon and American soldiers about trying to help Japan recover from the crisis without exposing U.S. military personnel to radiation.

A Pentagon spokesman said on Wednesday that U.S. military personnel and their families will not be allowed within 50 miles of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Reuters reports.

Reuters added that the American military “gave Japanese forces firetrucks and water pumps, but stressed Americans will not operate them.”

The news agency also reported that it found signs of trepidation from some American soldiers posting messages on Facebook:

On a Facebook page for U.S. Naval Forces Japan, some Americans voiced concern. One living in Atsugi, Japan, where radiation was detected at a naval base, asked about a potential evacuation.

“Having a toddler and being pregnant, I need to know if they can get us going,” wrote 21-year-old Chelsea Origer.

Another woman, identifying herself as Melanie Cobos Lopez, responded: “You know they will wait (until) the last (minute). Just book a flight and keep them babies safe.”

“Who knows what (they’re) not telling us,” she wrote.

According to an expert who has studied the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, the pregnant female soldier could have reason for concern.

Douglas Almond, a Columbia University economist whose research suggests that children in Sweden who were exposed, in utero, to low levels of radiation from Chernobyl “experienced significantly lower cognitive function” later in life, wrote to The Lede on Wednesday to express concern about possibly inadequate warnings to pregnant women in Japan.

Mr. Almond wrote:

Discussion of the likely public health impacts of nuclear crisis in Japan omit the evidence on developmental impacts, i.e. radiation exposure to pregnant women that damages the fetus and is not resolved/addressed by iodine supplementation.

For this reason, we think pregnant women might be targeted for relocation/remaining indoors at greater distances from the reactors than the non-pregnant population.

Mr. Almond’s research on the possible impact of low levels of radiation on Swedish children from Chernobyl accident was discussed at greater length in a post on our Economix blog by my colleague David Leonhardt.

The Lede’s coverage of the crisis in Japan will resume on Thursday. In the meantime, please visit the NYTimes.com homepage to reader reports from my colleagues in Japan, watch video reports and explore interactive graphics. The Lede’s Japan Crisis Twitter list is also worth keeping an eye on.

Thanks for your comments and tips.

5:20 P.M. |Video Report Shows Sea Walls Ripped Apart by Tsunami

Here is another powerful video report from Alex Thomson of Britain’s Channel 4 News, showing how the tsunami pummeled giant sea walls around a village outside Kamaishi, in Japan’s northeastern Iwate Prefecture:

After some criticism of his agency’s work, Yukiya Amano, the former Japanese diplomat who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced on Wednesday that he plans to visit Japan in person.

In a statement posted on the I.A.E.A. site devoted to the crisis, Mr. Amano said:

I plan to fly to Japan as soon as possible, hopefully tomorrow, to see the situation for myself and learn from our Japanese counterparts how best the I.A.E.A. can help. I will request that the Board of Governors meet upon my return to discuss the situation. My intention is that the first I.A.E.A. experts should leave for Japan as soon as possible.

Since Japan asked the I.A.E.A. to send a team of experts on Monday, Kyodo News reports, “the two parties have been discussing locations where the team should be deployed as well as the duration of its stay in Japan.”

As Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg News reports, twice in recent days, the I.A.E.A. has given reporters incorrect information: “The agency mixed up reactors over the weekend. On March 14, Amano told media that there was ‘no indication’ of melting fuel, even after Japanese officials had reported a ‘high probability.’”

Mr. Tirone adds that one expert has suggested that the agency is generally too concerned with diplomacy to be trusted in a crisis:

“The first rule of the I.A.E.A. is constant compromise with all the countries, but safety is incompatible with the art of compromise and diplomacy,” wrote Iouli Andreev in response to e-mailed questions. Andreev led the Soviet Spetsatom agency tasked with cleaning up the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. During that 1986 disaster, the “I.A.E.A. fully agreed with false information from the Politburo and Russian nuclear ministry.”

Mr. Amano, who was a career diplomat working for Japan’s government before taking on his current role, has certainly been less quick than other observers to make dramatic statements about the crisis.

Speaking about the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Guenther Oettinger, the European Union’s energy commissioner, said on Tuesday: “There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen.” On Wednesday, after the situation appeared to worsen, Mr. Oettinger told a European Parliament committee: “The site is effectively out of control.”

In further remarks captured on video, Mr. Oettinger cast the disaster in apocalyptic terms, saying: “In the coming hours, further catastrophic events can be expected with danger for the life and limbs of the people on the island.”

After stocks tumbled following his remarks, Mr. Oettinger’s spokeswoman told journalists that he was not privvy to inside information but merely conveying his impressions based on media reports.

Eric Besson, France’s minister of industry and energy, made similar remarks on Wednesday , telling BFM television: “Let’s not beat about the bush: they have visibly lost the essential of control. That is our analysis, in any case, it’s not what they are saying.”

Asked about these remarks later on Wednesday, Mr. Amano told reporters on that the sitation at hte plant is “very serious, ” but “it is not the time to say things are out of control, Reuters reported.

3:21 P.M. |British Advised to Leave Tokyo and Northern Japan

The British Embassy in Tokyo has posted a statement on its Web site saying that, “due to the evolving situation at the Fukushima nuclear facility and potential disruptions to the supply of goods, transport, communications, power and other infrastructure, British nationals in Tokyo and to the north of Tokyo should consider leaving the area.”

Somewhat confusingly, the statement also notes that most recent advice from Britain’s chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, “remains that for those outside the exclusion zone set up by the Japanese authorities there is no real human health issue that people should be concerned about.”

Speaking in Tokyo on Tuesday, Mr. Beddington repeated what he said on Monday, that even in “the worst case scenario,” the crisis in Japan would not rival the one that engulfed the area around Chernobyl in 1986. According to a transcript of his remarks at the British Embassy on Tuesday, Mr. Beddington said:

If the Japanese fail to keep the reactors cool and fail to keep the pressure in the containment vessels at an appropriate level, you can get this, you know, the dramatic word “meltdown.” But what does that actually mean? What a meltdown involves is the basic reactor core melts, and as it melts, nuclear material will fall through to the floor of the container. There it will react with concrete and other materials … that is likely.

Remember this is the reasonable worst case, we don’t think anything worse is going to happen. In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion. You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 meters up into the air. Now, that’s really serious, but it’s serious again for the local area. It’s not serious for elsewhere, even if you get a combination of that explosion it would only have nuclear material going in to the air up to about 500 meters.

If you then couple that with the worst possible weather situation, i.e. prevailing weather taking radioactive material in the direction of Greater Tokyo and you had maybe rainfall which would bring the radioactive material down, do we have a problem? The answer is unequivocally no. Absolutely no issue.

The problems are within 30 km of the reactor. And to give you a flavor for that, when Chernobyl had a massive fire at the graphite core, material was going up not just 500 meters but to 30,000 feet; it was lasting not for the odd hour or so but lasted months, and that was putting nuclear radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere for a very long period of time. But even in the case of Chernobyl, the exclusion zone that they had was about 30 kilometers. And in that exclusion zone, outside that, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate people had problems from the radiation.

The problems with Chernobyl were people were continuing to drink the water, continuing to eat vegetables and so on and that was where the problems came from. That’s not going to be the case here. So what I would really reemphasize is that this is very problematic for the area and the immediate vicinity and one has to have concerns for the people working there. Beyond that 20 or 30 kilometers, it’s really not an issue for health.

2:45 P.M. |U.S. Urges Wider Evacuation Zone Than Japan

After some confusing statements by Japanese officials about the exact nature of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northeastern Japan, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo has urged Americans within 50 miles of the facility to leave the area, Reuters reports.

In a statement distributed to reporters accompanying Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a trip to Egypt, the Embassy said: “We are recommending, as a precaution, that American citizens who live within 50 miles of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant evacuate the area or to take shelter indoors if safe evacuation is not practical.”

So far, Japan’s government has ordered the evacuation of people living within 20 kilometers (about 12.5 miles) of the plant and advised people within 30 kilometers (just over 18.5 miles) to evacuate or stay indoors.

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who is testifying to Congress right now, just said that his body would recommend an evacuation area much larger than has taken place around Japan’s reactors. Mr. Jaczko told the House Energy and Commerce committee, “as a prudent measure, with a comparable situation here in the United States, we would likely be looking at an evacuation of a larger distance.”

My colleague Matt Wald, who is following the hearing on our Green blog, reports:

Mr. Jaczko said the commission believed that all the water in the spent fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi unit 4 had boiled dry and that as a result, “we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”

In fact, experts say that it would be hard to approach a pool that was dry, because radiation levels would be so high. In a normally operating pool, the water provides not only cooling but radiation shielding.

1:39 P.M. |More Than 4,300 Dead and 8,600 Still Missing in Japan

Japan’s Kyodo News reports that the death toll has passed 4,300 and is expected to keep rising:

The National Police Agency said it has confirmed 4,314 deaths in 12 prefectures, as of midnight Wednesday, while 8,606 people remained unaccounted for in six prefectures.

The death toll, however, will inevitably climb higher as the recovery of bodies mainly in the tsunami-hit coastal areas started in full swing after waters there held back and tsunami warnings were lifted.

11:39 A.M. |Town Struck by Tsunami in 1960 Ruined Again

This video report from Alex Thomson of Britain’s Channel 4 News shows survivors camped out in an intact concrete theater in the ruined town of Ofunato, in Japan’s northeastern Iwate Prefecture, on Tuesday night:

Mr. Thomson’s report shows the fairly good conditions inside the town’s shelter in its concrete, brutalist theater, as well as a sign clearly marking the tsunami escape route from the coast.

As my colleagues James Glanz and Norimitsu Onishi reported on Friday, in Ofunato, “which was struck by a major tsunami in 1960, dozens of signs in Japanese and English mark escape routes, and emergency sirens are tested three times a day.”

In May, 1960 The New York Times published this photograph of the destruction of Ofunato by tsunami waves generated by a massive earthquake in Chile:

An image of the destruction of the Japanese town of Ofunato by a tsunami in May, 1960.

This video of the tsunami washing away buildings on Friday was posted on YouTube by a blogger who said that it was filmed in Ofunato during the catastrophe:

Perhaps because the town’s vulnerability to tsunamis is well-known, as the Channel 4 News report mentions, international rescue and recovery crews from China, Britain and the United States were dispatched to Ofunato this week.

As Stars and Stripes newspaper reported from Ofunato on Tuesday, the search for survivors among the rubble was difficult:

A U.S. search-and-rescue team was picking its way through a demolished neighborhood in this coastal village Tuesday when it found a desperate message scrawled on the wall of a collapsed home. The message said an 88-year-old woman had been on the first floor Friday when tsunamis swept through, tossing vehicles, splintering buildings and carrying away hundreds of victims.

The elite USAID search team from Fairfax County, Va., immediately called for rescue dogs and fellow team specialists who were carrying snaking camera gear that could peer into the 2½-foot space beneath the home.

In a 40-minute methodical search, team members found nothing. They could only mark the house with an international symbol indicating that they had not located the woman, who remains among nearly 200 city residents still missing four days after Japan’s largest recorded earthquake.

This video from the U.S. Department of Defense shows some of the American crew combing the rubble for survivors on Tuesday:

Video of Address by Japan’s Emperor

As my colleagues Mark McDonald and Kevin Drew report, “Emperor Akihito of Japan, in an unprecedented television address to the nation, said on Wednesday that he was ‘deeply worried’ about the ongoing nuclear crisis at several stricken reactors and asked for people to act with compassion ‘to overcome these difficult times.’”

Here is video from the address with a simultaneous English translation from NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, via CNN:

A new aftershock just hit Japan, several journalists reported on Twitter from Tokyo minutes ago.

Martyn Williams a Tokyo-based technology journalist writes that preliminary estimates say that it was a 5.3 magnitude earthquake at a depth of 60 kilometers (more than 30 miles) and that reports say there is “No danger of tsunami.”

Mark MacKinnon of Toronto’s Globe and Mail notes that the pianist at his hotel bar is so used to this by now that he failed to miss a note.

Big quake in Tokyo just now. Pianist in my hotel bar doesn’t miss a key.Wed Mar 16 13:40:10 via Mobile WebMark MacKinnon/马凯
markmackinnon

About two hours ago, Sarah Smith, a correspondent for Britain’s Channel 4 News, reported on Twitter that she had “Just spotted HUGE cracks in wall of Tokyo our hotel” caused by the aftershocks and wondered if that was a good or a bad sign of the building’s robustness.

Just spotted HUGE cracks in wall of Tokyo our hotel caused by #japanquake aftershocks. Does that mean building holding up safely – or not?Wed Mar 16 11:53:36 via Twitter for BlackBerry®sarah smith
sarahsmithC4

9:05 A.M. |Video of Damaged Nuclear Plant

As my colleagues Hiroko Tabuchi and Keith Bradsher report, Japanese authorities announced on Wednesday that “a second reactor unit at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan may have ruptured and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam.” That caused the Japanese military abandon a highly unusual plan to dump water from helicopters on the plant to lower temperatures in a pool containing spent fuel rods that was overheating dangerously.

This video from Japanese television of smoke rising from the damaged plant was posted online by Britain’s Channel 4 News:

Readers can also follow the crisis in real time by watching the live video stream of NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, in the player embedded at the top of this blog. The video feed is accompanied by NHK’s own simultaneous English translation.

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