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BBC MUNDO RADIO
- NEW: Japan is working to avoid harm to people's health, a top official says
- NEW: "We are still trying to control this accident," a top safety official says
- The level 7 designation puts Fukushima Daiichi on par with Chernobyl
- It follows expanded evacuation orders issued Monday
Tokyo (CNN) -- Japan declared the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant a top-scale event on the international system for rating nuclear accidents Tuesday, putting it on par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The decision to bump the accident up to level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale came after a review of the amount of radiation released in the month since the accident, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, chief spokesman, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. The Fukushima Daiichi accident is now at the top of that scale and two notches higher than the rating Japanese officials assigned to it previously.
"Right at this moment, we are still trying to control this accident, and the nuclear reactors are not stable yet," Nishiyama said. "We are dealing with all our might and resources and try to minimize the impact of the radiation to the people around this nuclear plant."
Tetsunari Iida, a former nuclear engineer-turned-industry critic, told CNN the declaration has no immediate practical impact on the crisis. But it's a sign that Japanese regulators have rethought their earlier assessments of the disaster, said Iida, who now runs an alternative energy think-tank in Tokyo.
The announcement comes a day after Japan ordered new evacuations for towns around the plant, including some outside the 20- and 30-km danger zones drawn in the early days of the accident.
Japan's nuclear concerns explained
But both Nishiyama and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, the Japanese government's leading spokesman on the crisis, tried to draw distinctions between their crisis and Soviet experience at Chernobyl.
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Finding memories in Japan "The change in the level reminds us the accident is very big," Edano said. "I apologize to the residents of the area, the people of Japan and the international community."
But he added, "What's different here from the Chernobyl accident is that we have not yet seen a direct impact on the health of the people as a result of the nuclear accident. The accident itself is big, but we will make, as our first priority, our utmost effort to avoid any health impact on the people."
Scientists believe the amount of radiation released is only a tenth of what was released at Chernobyl, Nishiyama said. But the levels for radioactive iodine and cesium that have been spewed into the air, water and soil around the plant are in the tens of trillions of bequerels -- 15 times higher than the threshold for a top-scale event, according to figures released by the safety agency Tuesday morning.
Nishiyama said the designation was made "provisionally," and that a final level won't be set until the disaster is over and a more detailed investigation has been conducted. The previous event level of 5, equal to the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, was also a provisional designation.
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Three Mile Island involved a partial meltdown of the radioactive core of one reactor, with only a limited release of radioactivity, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
At Chernobyl, an explosion and fire at a nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union resulted in the permanent evacuation of a 30-km (19-mile) radius around the plant. There were 32 deaths among plant workers and firefighters, mostly due to radiation exposure, and the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates another 4,000 will die of related cancers.
Japan ordered people living within 20 km of the plant to evacuate after the accident began March 11. A few days later, it told people living another 10 km out to stay inside their homes. Monday, it warned that many of those remaining inside the 20-30 km belt would need to leave -- and so would residents of several other towns outside the existing danger zone, Edano said.
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"This policy does not require immediate evacuation right away, but we take the long-term perspective, considering the long-term effect of radiation on your health," Edano told reporters.
Evacuation orders have so far covered about 85,000 people inside the 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) zone, while another 62,000 within 30 kilometers have been told to stay inside, Fukushima prefecture officials told CNN. Japan's government said it had no estimate of the number of people who would be covered by the new directives.
The move was triggered by the discovery of low levels of radiation that could give residents a dose of more than 20 millisieverts per year -- a tiny fraction of what would cause immediate radiation sickness, but more than seven times the amount a typical resident of a western industrialized country receives from background sources in a year. Long-term exposures to those levels of radiation could increase the risk of cancer, and the presence of cesium isotopes that have half-lives of up to 30 years means that radioactivity could linger for some time.
One-month anniversary of disaster
Edano said Monday that Japanese should "be ready for the possibility that things may turn for the worse." About an hour after he spoke, a fresh earthquake rattled the country, forcing workers to evacuate the plant and knocking out power to the three damaged reactors for about 40 minutes, the plant's owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, reported.
The magnitude 6.6 tremor came a month to the day after the magnitude 9 quake and tsunami that knocked out the plant's cooling systems, and followed a magnitude 7.1 aftershock Thursday night. But neither the 6.6 quake nor any of the smaller ones that rippled across the region Monday night and Tuesday inflicted any more damage to the plant, Tokyo Electric officials told reporters.
Tuesday morning, a fire broke out in a battery storage building in a water discharge area of reactors 1-4 at Fukushima Daiichi, Tokyo Electric said. The fire was out a few hours later and the company said it caused no radiation emissions and no effect on cooling systems.
The cause was not immediately known, the company said.
CNN's Whitney Hurst and Junko Ogura contributed to this report.
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