Nuclear Threat Level Raised to 7 | Crisis Rated in International Highest (Most Severe) Category

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/12/japan-nuclear-alert-level-seven

Guardian UK...

Japan raises nuclear alert level to seven

Fukushima Daiichi power plant emergency is now on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl warning

Justin McCurry in Tokyo
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 April 2011 01.54 BST

Photo: Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station where the radiation level warning has been raised to a maximum of seven. Photograph: EPA

Japan is to raise the nuclear alert level at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to a maximum seven, putting the emergency on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Nuclear safety officials had insisted they had no plans to raise the severity of the crisis from five – the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 – according to the international nuclear and radiological event scale.

But the government came under pressure to raise the level at the plant after Japan's nuclear safety commission estimated the amount of radioactive material released from its stricken reactors reached 10,000 terabecquerels per hour for several hours following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country's northeast coast on 11 March. That level of radiation constitutes a major accident, according to the INES scale.

The scale, devised by the international atomic energy agency, ranks nuclear and radiological accidents and incidents by their severity from one to seven.

Japan also temporarily issued tsunami warnings for parts of the north-east coast on Monday following another powerful aftershock. It is exactly a month since a magnitude-9 earthquake created huge waves that left an estimated 28,000 people dead or missing. NHK, the public broadcaster, warned of a tsunami up to 2 metres high on the coast of Ibaraki prefecture after the magnitude-7.1 quake.

Although the waves were estimated to be much smaller than those that hit on 11 March, the meteorological agency warned people in Ibaraki to evacuate to higher ground. The warnings were later lifted.

The aftershock came as the government said it was widening the evacuation zone around the plant due to high levels of accumulated radiation and fears about long-term effects on residents' health. A fire that broke out at the plant's number four reactor at 6.38am local time was extinguished, the operator, Tokyo Electric Power company (Tepco), said.

More than 14,000 people are still missing following the disaster, and 152,000 survivors are living in evacuation centres.

The prime minister, Naoto Kan, placed a message in newspapers in several countries, including Britain, China and the United States, thanking the international community for its support. Kan said the generosity shown towards Japan in its time of need demonstrated the human capacity for kizuna, or bonds of friendship, and vowed that Japan would emerge a stronger nation.

"We deeply appreciate the kizuna our friends from around the world have shown and I want to thank every nation, entity, and you personally, from the bottom of my heart," he said.

The government's chief spokesman, Yukio Edano, said the current 12-mile (20km) evacuation zone would be extended to five other communities, including the village of Iitate, which lies 25 miles from the plant.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-to-raise-rating-of-nuclear-crisis-to-h...

The Washington Post...

Japan rates nuclear crisis at highest severity level

By Chico Harlan, Monday, April 11, 10:22 PM

TOKYO — Japanese authorities raised Tuesday their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Life after Chernobyl: The explosion that struck 25 years ago this month at Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident, set in motion a major undertaking that today bears on the life of the entire country of Ukraine.

Officials with Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.” The reassessment comes at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency says the plant is showing “early signs of recovery” but still in a critical condition.

The plant’s debilitated reactors face constant threat of strong aftershocks, and the latest on Tuesday morning — a 6.2-magnitude temblor — caused a brief fire at a water sampling facility near Daiichi’s No. 4 reactor. The Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the power plant, said that the critical process used to cool the hot fuel rods had not been interrupted, and radiation levels showed no signs of change.

A level 7 accident, according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, is typified by a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.”

Previously only Chernobyl had been given a 7 rating. The 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania was rated a level 5 incident.

Radiation leaking from Fukushima Daiichi amounts to about 10 percent of that from the Chernobyl accident, a Nuclear Safety Commission official, who was not named, said on national television.

Nonetheless, the crisis has prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands who live within 19 miles of the plant. Japan’s government had initially called for a mandatory evacuation within a 12-mile radius. But Japan on Monday widened its evacuation zone, selecting certain towns within 19 miles — those with higher radiation readings — for mandatory evacuation.

According to the Kyodo news agency, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reported Monday that the plant, at one point after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, had been releasing 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactivity per hour. The report did not specify when those radiation readings occurred. A release of tens of thousands of terabecquerels per hour, though, correspondents with the radiation leakage level that the IAEA uses as a minimum benchmark for a level 7 accident.

“This corresponds to a large fraction of the core inventory of a power reactor, typically involving a mixture of short- and long-lived radionuclides,” an IAEA document says. “With such a release, stochastic health effects over a wide area, perhaps involving more than one country, are expected.”

http://www.euronews.net/2011/04/12/japan-raises-nuclear-threat-to-highest-level/

Euronnews...

Japan raises nuclear threat to highest level

12/04 06:03 CET

One month on from Japan’s twin disasters and the severity of the continuing nuclear crisis has been put on a par with that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The threat level has been raised to seven, but the rating reflects the initial severity of the radiation leaks and not the current situation which has recently improved.

Since the March 11 earthquake, eastern Japan has been rocked by a series of after shocks. Yesterday’s was felt in Tokyo but that has been followed by yet another off the coast of Chiba, around 77 kilometres north of the capital.

Work is continuing to clear the debris but it is being hampered by the government’s decision to extend the exclusion zone round the Fukushima plant. Thousands more people have been affected by the move, having to leave their homes for who knows how long.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-04/12/c_13825027.htm

Radiation leakage of Japan's nuclear plant may eventually exceed that of Chernobyl: TEPCO

English.news.cn 2011-04-12 12:20:17

TOKYO, April 12 (Xinhua) --

The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) , the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, said Tuesday that it is concerned that radiation leakage at the plant could eventually exceed that of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, Kyodo reported on Tuesday.

"The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that the amount of leakage could eventually reach that of Chernobyl or exceed it,"' an official from the TEPCO said.

Japan on Tuesday morning raised the severity level of the accident at the plant to the maximum 7 on an international scale, up from the current 5 and matching that of the Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/world/asia/12japan.html?_r=1&hp

The New York Times...

April 11, 2011
Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl

By HIROKO TABUCHI and KEITH BRADSHER

TOKYO — Japan has decided to raise its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday.

The decision to raise the alert level to 7 from 5 on the scale amounts to an admission that the accident at the nuclear facility, brought on by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, is likely to have substantial and long-lasting consequences for health and for the environment. Some in the nuclear industry have been saying for weeks that the accident released large amounts of radiation, but Japanese officials had played down this possibility.

The new estimates by Japanese authorities suggest that the total amount of radioactive materials released so far is equal to about 10 percent of that released in the Chernobyl accident, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Mr. Nishiyama stressed that unlike at Chernobyl, where the reactor itself exploded and fire fanned the release of radioactive material, the containments at the four troubled reactors at Fukushima remained intact over all.

But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric and Power, said, “The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”

On the International Nuclear Event Scale, a Level 7 nuclear accident involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.” The scale, which was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and countries that use nuclear energy, leaves it to the nuclear agency of the country where the accident occurs to calculate a rating based on complicated criteria.

Japan’s previous rating of 5 placed the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Level 7 has been applied only to the disaster at Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union.

“This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.”

Mr. Nishiyama said “tens of thousands of terabecquerels” of radiation per hour have been released from the plant. (The measurement refers to how much radioactive material was emitted, not the dose absorbed by living things.) The scale of the radiation leak has since dropped to under one terabecquerel per hour, the Kyodo news agency said, citing government officials.

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The announcement came as Japan was preparing to urge more residents around the crippled nuclear plant to evacuate, because of concerns over long-term exposure to radiation.

Also on Monday, tens of thousands of people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 p.m., exactly one month since the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami brought widespread destruction to Japan’s northeast coast.

The mourning was punctuated by another strong aftershock near Japan’s Pacific coast, which briefly set off a tsunami warning, killed a 16-year-old girl and knocked out cooling at the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi power station for almost an hour, underscoring the vulnerability of the plant’s reactors to continuing seismic activity.

On Tuesday morning, there was another strong aftershock, which shook Tokyo.

The authorities have already ordered people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to evacuate, and recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of 18 miles.

The government’s decision to expand the zone came in response to radiation readings that would be worrisome over months in certain communities beyond those areas, underscoring how difficult it has been to predict the ways radiation spreads from the damaged plant.

Unlike the previous definitions of the areas to be evacuated, this time the government designated specific communities that should be evacuated, instead of a radius expressed in miles.

The radiation has not spread evenly from the reactors, but instead has been directed to some areas and not others by weather patterns and the terrain. Iitate, one of the communities told on Monday to prepare for evacuation, lies well beyond the 18-mile radius, but the winds over the last month have tended to blow northwest from the Fukushima plant toward Iitate, which may explain why high readings were detected there.

Yukio Edano, the government’s chief cabinet secretary, said that the government would order Iitate and four other towns to prepare to evacuate.

Officials are concerned that people in these communities are being exposed to radiation equivalent to at least 20 millisieverts a year, he said, which could be harmful to human health over the long term. Evacuation orders will come within a month for Katsurao, Namie, Iitate and parts of Minamisoma and Kawamata, Mr. Edano said.

People in five other areas may also be told to evacuate if the conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant grow worse, Mr. Edano said. Those areas are Hirono, Naraha, Kawauchi, Tamura and other sections of Minamisoma.

“This measure is not an order for you to evacuate or take actions immediately,” he said. “We arrived at this decision by taking into account the risks of remaining in the area in the long term.” He appealed for calm and said that the chance of a large-scale radiation leak from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had, in fact, decreased.

Mr. Edano also said that pregnant women, children and hospital patients should stay out of the area within 19 miles of the reactors and that schools in that zone would remain closed.

Until now, the Japanese government had refused to expand the evacuation zone, despite urging from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States and Australia have advised their citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the plant.

The international agency, which is based in Vienna, said Sunday that its team measured radiation on Saturday of 0.4 to 3.7 microsieverts per hour at distances of 20 to 40 miles from the damaged plant — well outside the initial evacuation zone. At that rate of accumulation, it would take 225 days to 5.7 years to reach the Japanese government’s threshold level for evacuations: radiation accumulating at a rate of at least 20 millisieverts per year.

In other words, only the areas with the highest readings would qualify for the new evacuation ordered by the government.

Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric, visited the tsunami-stricken area on Monday for the first time since the crisis began. He called on the governor of Fukushima Prefecture, Yuhei Sato, but was refused a meeting. He left his business card instead.

Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375981/Now-radiation-Japan-bad-Chernoby...

Daily Mail...

Now radiation in Japan is as bad as Chernobyl as crisis level is raised to 7 for only the second time in history

By Richard Shears
Last updated at 5:20 AM on 12th April 2011

Japanese officials admitted today that the spread of radiation from its crippled nuclear plant was out of control and that the government had raised the crisis level to the worst on the international scale.

With radioactive substances pouring out over what the government said was a 'wide area' the crisis level had been raised from 5 to 7, posing a threat to human health and the environment.

Level 7 has only been applied to the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union in 1986.

Officials were due to explain the extent of the danger at a news conference later on Tuesday.

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant had been releasing a massive amount of radioactive substances.

An unnamed official said the amount of radiation leaking from the nuclear plant was around 10 per cent of the Chernobyl accident.

The level 7 signifies a 'major accident' with 'wider consequences' than the previous level, according to the standards scale.

'We have upgraded the severity level to 7 as the impact of radiation leaks has been widespread from the air, vegetables, tap water and the ocean,' said Minoru Oogoda of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

NISA officials said one of the factors behind the decision was that the total amount of radioactive particles released into the atmosphere since the incident had reached levels that apply to a Level 7 incident.

On March 18, a week after the earthquake and tsunami which destroyed towns and villages on the east coast and severely damaged the Fukushima plant, the agency estimated the crisis level at the nuclear complex to be at level 5, the same as the accident at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979.

But level 7 has only been applied to Chernobyl in 1986, when hundreds of thousands of terabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 were released into the atmosphere with dire consequences for the health of people hundreds of miles around.

Officials are gravely concerned that another major earthquake in the region will cause further problems at Fukushima - and might also damage other nuclear plants on the east coast.

A strong earthquake - of magnitude 7 - hit the Fukushima Prefecture at a depth of four miles on Monday, shaking offices and homes, but an initial tsunami warning was lifted.

Several minor quakes followed later but officials have warned of further strong aftershocks in the days and weeks to come.

What the government fears is that another earthquake or tsunami could cripple other nuclear plants, increasing the spread of radiation in the air and in the sea.

Meanwhile, setbacks continued at the tsunami-stricken nuclear power complex.

Workers discovered a small fire near a reactor building Tuesday. The fire was extinguished quickly, the plant's operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the disabled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, said the fire at a box that contains batteries in a building near the No. 4 reactor was discovered at about 6:38 a.m. Tuesday and was put out seven minutes later.

It wasn't clear whether the fire was related to a magnitude-6.3 earthquake that shook the Tokyo area Tuesday morning. The cause of the fire is being investigated.

'The fire was extinguished immediately. It has no impact on Unit 4's cooling operations for the spent fuel rods,' said TEPCO spokesman Naoki Tsunoda.

The plant was damaged in a massive tsunami March 11 that knocked out cooling systems and backup diesel generators, leading to explosions at three reactors and a fire at a fourth that was undergoing regular maintenance and was empty of fuel.

The magnitude-9.0 earthquake that caused the tsunami immediately stopped the three reactors, but overheated cores and a lack of cooling functions led to further damage.

Engineers have been able to pump water into the damaged reactors to cool them down, but leaks have resulted in the pooling of tons of contaminated, radioactive water that has prevented workers from conducting further repairs.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375981/Now-radiation-Japan-bad-Chernoby...

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/?p=4378&preview=true

What Does Fukushima's New “Level 7” Status Mean?

Posted by Krista Mahr Monday, April 11, 2011 at 11:20 pm

A man tested for radiation in Fukushima

Japanese officials announced on Tuesday morning that they were planning to raise the event level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from a 5 to the maximum level of 7, the highest on the international scale for nuclear incidents and the same level assigned to the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

The decision was made after Japan's nuclear safety body determined that at one point after the March 11 earthquake, the plant was releasing 10,000 terabecquerels of iodine-131 for several hours; level 7 accidents are defined as releasing tens of thousands of terabecquerels. "We have upgraded the severity level to 7 as the impact of radiation leaks has been widespread from the air, vegetables, tap water and the ocean," Minoru Oogoda of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) told AP.

The amount of radioactive material being released at Fukushima today, however, is less than 1 terabecquerel, and NISA says that to date Fukushima has only released about 10% of total radiation released in Chernobyl — 1.8 million terabecquerels — 25 years ago. About 30 people, mostly workers, died in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, though the UN has estimated that the long-term death toll due to exposure could eventually be as high as 4000. (See TIME's list of the top 10 environmental disasters.)

The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), designed in 1989 by the IAEA and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the OECD, ranges from 1 (anomaly) to 7 (major accident.) The scale is intended to help easily communicate with the public to indicate the seriousness of a nuclear event. Chernobyl is the only other nuclear accident to have been given a 7, an accident classified as having a major radioactive release with widespread impact on the environment and public health. According to INES, “Such a release would result in the possibility of acute health effects; delayed health effects over a wide area, possibly involving more than one country; long-term environmental consequences.” (Read the IAEA's glossary of short to long-term health effects of radiation exposure here.)

Besides Chernobyl, the only event that's come close to a 7 before was a 1957 accident at a fuel processing plant (where spent nuclear fuel is recycled into new useable nuclear energy) in Russia, in which an off-site release of radiation prompted preventative evacuations. The Three Mile Island accident in the U.S. in 1978, in which a reactor core was severely damage but off-site release of radiactiviy was limited, was classifed as a 5. Nearly all reported events at nuclear facilities are a level 3 or under, according to INES.

Tuesday's announcement comes on the back of a minor fire spotted by workers outside Fukushima's Reactor 4 on Tuesday morning, shortly after the second of two major aftershocks hit the beleaguered northeast in the space of 24 hours. Three people in Iwaki died in landslides triggered by the 7.1 aftershock on Monday evening. The government has also expanded the exclusion zone around Fukushima on Monday to include several towns within a 30-km (19 mile) radius who had formerly been told that they could remain at home, but were recommended to stay indoors. The towns added to the evacuation zone were found to have high levels of radiation.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace has said that it found radiation levels 75 times higher than the government recommendation in 11 samples of vegetables from gardens and small farms in its own survey around Fukushima last week. The environmental group also announced that it found radiation levels equivalent to annual exposure of 5 millisieverts — the evacuation threshold for Chernobyl — in a playground in Fukushima City, population 300,000. Greenpeace is urging the government to delay the start of the school year.

(See pictures from inside Japan's nuclear wasteland by clicking on link at top of this submission.)

CONTINUED.......

PART TWO.........

The "nuclear renaissance" that wasn't

"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.

Japanese authorities attributed growing concentrations of cesium-134, with a two-year half-life, and cesium-137, which loses half its radioactivity over 30 years, to the decay of larger concentrations of iodine-131, which has a half-life of eight days.

Edano said residents of five towns and cities to the north and west of the plant -- Katsurao, Kawamata, Namie, Iitate and parts of Minami Soma -- should evacuate within a month if they have not already done so. Parts of Namie and Minami Soma are already within the 20-kilometer evacuation radius drawn in the first days of the accident, while Iitate, Kawamata and Katsurao are beyond the 30-kilometer range.

Residents of five other areas -- in Hirono, Kawauchi, Naraha and parts of Tamura to the south, and the rest of Minami Soma -- were told they should be prepared to clear out soon. Hirono and Kawauchi lie in the outer belt of the current zone, while Naraha and Tamura are beyond the current 30-kilometer radius.

One-month anniversary of disaster

The anti-nuclear group Greenpeace, which had warned about higher radiation levels in towns outside the evacuation zone two weeks ago, called Edano's declaration a good step, but said evacuations should take place sooner than the one-month goal Japan has set. Jan van de Putte, a Greenpeace radiation safety expert who took readings in Iitate and Namie, said the levels of radioactivity are likely to remain dangerous "for years to come."

"The bad news is what we're seeing today is going to decay very, very gradually," van de Putte told CNN.

After a month of improvisation and frustration, Tokyo Electric says it has no idea when it will be able to restore normal cooling for the reactors and spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo. Tokyo Electric President Masataka Shimizu visited the off-site headquarters for authorities attempting to manage the disaster Monday and met with local officials from Fukushima Prefecture, emerging to issue another apology for the situation.

"I would like to apologize from the bottom of my heart to the people of Fukushima and residents of the host towns of the Fukushima power plant for forcing them to go through enormous difficulties due to the accident that occurred in the wake of the quake and tsunami," he said in a prepared statement released through the company.

Shimizu -- who was hospitalized for "fatigue and stress" in late March -- also expressed regret that he didn't apologize to Fukushima Prefecture residents before Monday. The province's governor skipped the meeting, however.

Engineers are working to drain highly radioactive water from the basements of the turbine plants behind reactors No. 1 through 3 even as they pour hundreds of metric tons of water a day into the reactors to keep them cool. The water must be pumped out in order to get to the machinery that runs the coolant systems, and Tokyo Electric has dumped more than 10,000 tons of less-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean in the past week to make room for the stuff -- a move that drew sharp criticism of the Japanese government, which approved the discharge as an emergency measure.

Other contamination is leaking into the Pacific behind the plant, most likely carried along by groundwater, Japanese regulators have said.

At the plant Monday, workers began installing sections of silt fence around the water intakes at the back of the plant to screen out radioactive particles. But the injection of nitrogen into the containment vessel around reactor No. 1 to counter a buildup of explosive hydrogen was stopped for the recent earthquake, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, the chief spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

In addition, Nishiyama said engineers have found gas escaping from the reactor containment vessel. But he said the nitrogen injections will resume, and the leaks were not affecting the stability of the reactor.

Hydrogen buildup is a symptom of overheated fuel rods in the reactor core. Spectacular hydrogen explosions blew the roofs and walls off the buildings surrounding the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors in the days after the tsunami, and another suspected hydrogen blast may have caused a leak in the No. 2 reactor. Tokyo Electric has said there is little danger of another explosion, but has begun pumping nitrogen into unit No. 1 as a precaution and plans to do the same for units 2 and 3.

Ailing Chang and Susan Olson, and CNN's Whitney Hurst and Ingrid Formanek contributed to this report.