Radiation risk puts halt to plant work

FUKUSHIMA, Japan – Japan suspended operations to keep its stricken nuclear plant from melting down today after surging radiation made it too dangerous to stay.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the workers dousing the reactors in a frantic effort to cool them needed to withdraw.

“The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now,” Edano said. “Because of the radiation risk we are on standby.”

The nuclear crisis has triggered international alarm and partly overshadowed the human tragedy caused by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, which pulverized Japan’s northeastern coastline, killing an estimated 10,000 people and severely damaging the nuclear plant.

Since then, authorities have tried frantically to avert an environmental catastrophe at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex in northeastern Japan, 140 miles north of Tokyo.

Edano said the government expects to ask the U.S. military for help. He did not elaborate. He said the government is still considering whether and how to take up the various offers of help from other countries.

The surge in radiation was apparently the result of a Tuesday fire in the complex’s Unit 4 reactor, according to officials with Japan’s nuclear safety agency. That blast is thought to have damaged the reactor’s suppression chamber, a water-filled pipe outside the nuclear core that is part of the emergency cooling system.

Officials had originally planned use helicopters and firetrucks to spray water in a desperate effort to prevent further radiation leaks and to cool down the reactors.

“It’s not so simple that everything will be resolved by pouring in water. We are trying to avoid creating other problems,” Edano said.

“We are actually supplying water from the ground, but supplying water from above involves pumping lots of water and that involves risk. We also have to consider the safety of the helicopters above,” he said.

A U.S. nuclear expert said he feared the worst.

“It’s more of a surrender,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who now heads the nuclear safety program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group. “It’s not like you wait 10 days and the radiation goes away. In that 10 days things are going to get worse.

“It’s basically a sign that there’s nothing left to do but throw in the towel,” Lochbaum said.

There are six reactors at the plant, and the three that were operating at the time have been rocked by explosions. The one still on fire was offline at the time of the magnitude 9.0 quake, Japan’s most powerful on record.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency estimated that 70 percent of the rods have been damaged at the No. 1 reactor.

Japan’s national news agency, Kyodo, said that 33 percent of the fuel rods at the No. 2 reactor were damaged and that the cores of both reactors were believed to have partially melted.

“We don’t know the nature of the damage,” said Minoru Ohgoda, spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, or NISA. “It could be either melting, or there might be some holes in them.”

Meanwhile, the outer housing of the containment vessel at the No. 4 unit erupted in flames early today, said Hajimi Motujuku, a spokesman for the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co.

NISA said fire and smoke could no longer be seen at Unit 4, but that it was unable to confirm that the blaze had been put out.

As workers struggled to contain the world’s worst nuclear crisis in a quarter of a century, survivors of the earthquake and tsunami suffered through shortages, bitter cold and overnight snowfall.

Tens of thousands of residents within a 20-mile radius surrounding the Fukushima plant were essentially trapped indoors for a second day today, urged again by authorities to avoid going out unless it was an emergency. That posed a conundrum for those who have already been scrambling to try to obtain basic necessities: food, water and medicine, which have all been hard to come by in the devastated area.

“Yesterday, we ate a bit of rice and one egg,” said Yoshiko Tsuzuki, 55, a housewife standing beside her husband and 16-year old daughter in a queue outside a grocery store in Kashshimagai, outside the battered city of Sendai. “We’re hungry. I want to buy water and anything to eat. We need everything.”

It remained unclear why a country renowned for its efficiency has been unable to marshal convoys of supply trucks into the tsunami-hit area, as China did after its 2008 earthquake. While military vehicles were evident, there were limited emergency supplies seen on the major arteries from Tokyo into the hard-hit Tohuku region and points south.

Even in Japanese cities that lie well outside the earthquake zone, daily life was increasingly disrupted by rolling cuts in electricity and the curtailment of the much-vaunted transport network – both of which will be key to restarting the engine of the world’s third-largest economy.

Five days later, the true scale of the disaster was unknown. At least 10,000 people are feared dead, a reckoning that is expected to take weeks to finalize. About half a million others have been displaced by quake and tsunami damage or the evacuation triggered by the emergency at Fukushima, a once-obscure nuclear complex that is now the focus of worldwide scrutiny.