The cable had reached the site by 1730 local time (0830 GMT) on Thursday, and engineers planned to reconnect power to the reactor once workers have finished spraying seawater over reactor 3. The process of reconnecting power could take up to 15 hours. Helicopters and water cannon have been dumping seawater over the Fukushima reactors, to try to prevent fuel rods melting. Video footage had suggested most of the water had been falling outside the target buildings, but a Tepco spokesman said it appeared the operation had had some success. "When we poured water, we monitored steam rising from the facility. By pouring water, we believe the water turned down the heat. We believe that there was a certain effect." Another spokesman said on Thursday that aerial observations of reactor 4 indicated it did contain some water. "We have not confirmed how much water was left inside but we have not had information that spent fuel rods are exposed." Earlier, a senior IAEA official said the situation at Fukushima had not deteriorated, but could yet do so. He described the situation at "reasonably stable".
Japan has imposed a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone around Fukushima and has urged people living up to 30km away to stay indoors. Some countries have advised their nationals in Japan to stay up to 50km away. Tens of thousands of people are still struggling with the after effects of last Friday's massive quake and tsunami. In areas of the north-east badly hit by the tsunami, bitter winter weather has added to the misery of survivors, though more supplies are now reported to be reaching them. The number of people now known to have died in the twin disaster stands at 5,692 with 9,506 people listed as missing. But the official toll is based on names registered with police, and the true figure could be in the tens of thousands. About 380,000 people are currently still in temporary shelters, many sleeping on the floor of school gymnasiums. Many foreign countries are evacuating their nationals from northeast Japan, or advising them to leave the country entirely.
The crisis has also continued to affect the markets - the benchmark Nikkei index fell 3.6% in early Thursday trading in Tokyo, shortly after the yen briefly hit the highest level against the US dollar since World War II. (map & photos)
the abyss will gaze back into you.**
Friedrich Nietzsche
LARGEST QUAKES -
This morning -
5.6 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.2 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.3 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Yesterday -
3/17/11 -
5.6 VANUATU
6.2 VANUATU
5.3 SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS REGION
5.1 OFFSHORE VALPARAISO, CHILE
5.0 OFFSHORE VALPARAISO, CHILE
5.1 NEAR EAST COAST OF KAMCHATKA
5.3 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.6 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.8 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.5 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.4 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.2 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.3 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.6 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.2 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
6.0 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.3 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
LATEST JAPAN NEWS -
05:46 - It is now exactly one week since the earthquake struck at 0246 local time (0546 GMT).
05:12 - Japanese fire engines have now resumed spraying water on the Fukushima plant.
05:06 - Fukushima's operator TEPCO has said that it would not be impossible to encase the plant's reactors in concrete, though cooling them down is the priority,
04:28 - "If I'm doing math right the people in Fukushima city absorbing equiv. of 1.75 chest x-rays daily at current rate."
04:25 - Japanese engineers are still trying to restore power at Fukushima by laying an electricity cable - there is no news yet of what they have managed to do by now. The issue is how they are going to attach the cable. It's not just high radiation levels they are facing, but the problem is that the plant's buildings have been badly damaged
04:03 - About 80 miles away from Fukushima, "there is panic-buying and lines at petrol stations and a lack of petrol and a lack of certain supplies. In general people seem to be pretty calm but it is sort of a facade. Underneath you can tell everyone is really anxious."
03:54 - "As several others have noted, Tokyo is far from the panic-stricken city portrayed by certain tabloids. I have just returned from lunch in the business district where every restaurant was open and selling piles of lunch boxes. Things are sold out because of panic buying - not through a lack of supply. Food always comes in the mornings - it just gets bought up by people caught up in things. I just hope the supply situation is better in the North as there is enough food in Tokyo to feed a great many people. The sooner general volunteers can help out up there the better, the professionals will be exhausted after their commendable and titanic efforts."
03:20 - More than 285,000 people are now taking refuge in the quake- and tsunami-hit areas in north-eastern Japan.
03:17 - US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman says that it is likely to take SEVERAL WEEKS TO COOL DOWN THE TROUBLED NUCLEAR REACTORS at Fukushima.
0253: Tokyo Electric Power Company says it hopes to active the cooling system at reactor 2 as early as Friday night.
02:36 - The Miyagi government is to ask quake victims to leave the prefecture due to housing shortages.
02:24 -The official death toll as of Friday morning: 6,405 dead and 10,259 missing.
02:18 - Japan's nuclear safety agency says smoke has been seen rising from reactor 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. A spokesman says the agency does not know the cause, but an explosion occurred in the building earlier in the week.
01:49 - Radiation readings at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant have been falling on Friday morning. Measurements taken about a kilometre from the plant were 279.4 microsieverts per hour, against 292.2 microsieverts per hour on Thursday evening.
00:57 - The restoration of electricity at Fukushima's reactors 3 and 4 is expected on Sunday.
A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late today. Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.
The forecast, calculated Tuesday, is based on patterns of Pacific winds at that time and the predicted path is likely to change as weather patterns shift. On Sunday, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it expected that no “harmful levels of radioactivity” would travel from Japan to the United States “given the thousands of miles between the two countries.” The test ban treaty group routinely does radiation projections in an effort to understand which of its global stations to activate for monitoring the worldwide ban on nuclear arms testing. It has more than 60 stations that sniff the air for radiation spikes and uses weather forecasts and powerful computers to model the transport of radiation on the winds.
On Wednesday, the agency declined to release its Japanese forecast, which The New York Times obtained from other sources. The forecast was distributed widely to the agency’s member states.
But in interviews, the technical specialists of the agency did address how and why the forecast had been drawn up. “It’s simply an indication. We have global coverage. So when something happens, it’s important for us to know which station can pick up the event.” The Japan forecast shows that the radioactive plume will probably miss the agency’s monitoring stations at Midway and in the Hawaiian Islands but is likely to be detected in the Aleutians and at a monitoring station in Sacramento.
The forecast assumes that radioactivity in Japan is released continuously and forms a rising plume. It ends with the plume heading into Southern California and the American Southwest, including Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The plume projection would have continued eastward if the United Nations scientists had run the projection forward. Earlier this week, the leading edge of the tangible plume was detected by the Navy’s Seventh Fleet when it was operating about 100 miles northeast of the Japanese reactor complex. On Monday, the Navy said it had repositioned its ships and aircraft off Japan “as a precautionary measure.” The United Nations agency has also detected radiation from the stricken reactor complex at its detector station in Gunma, Japan, which lies about 130 miles to the southwest.
Would the meltdown of a core of one of the reactors increase the chance of harmful radiation reaching Hawaii or the West Coast? “I don’t want to speculate on various scenarios. But based on the design and the distances involved, it is very unlikely that there would be any harmful impacts.”
The likely path of the main Japanese plume across the Pacific has also caught the attention of Europeans, many of whom recall how the much closer Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine began spewing radiation. In Germany on Wednesday, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection held a news conference that described the threat from the Japanese plume as trifling and said there was no need for people to take iodine tablets. The pills can prevent poisoning from the atmospheric release of iodine-131, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear plants. The United States is also carefully monitoring and forecasting the plume’s movements. The agencies include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy.
With Quest to Cool Fuel Rods Stumbling, U.S. Sees ‘Weeks’ of Struggle - The Japanese efforts focused on a different part of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station from the reactor — No. 4 — depicted in Washington on Wednesday as presenting a far bleaker threat than the Japanese government had offered. The decision to focus on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that Japanese officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as mox, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium. Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of mox into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. The Japanese authorities also expressed concern on Wednesday that the pressure in the No. 3 reactor had plunged and that either gauges were malfunctioning or a rupture had already occurred. The reactor typically needs 50 tons of water, or about 12,000 gallons, a day to keep from overheating.
Radiation of about 250 millisievert an hour had been detected 100 feet above the plant. In the United States, the once-in-a-lifetime exposure limit for police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers engaged in life-saving activity is equal to being exposed to 250 millisieverts for a full hour.
While radiation levels at the plant have varied tremendously, the peak levels reported there “would be lethal within a fairly short period of time.”
While maps of the plume of radiation being given off by the plant show that an elongated cloud will stretch across the Pacific, American officials said it would be so dissipated by the time it reached the West Coast of the United States that it would not pose a health threat. Close to the site, however, “we would recommend an evacuation to a much larger radius than has currently been provided by Japan.” That assessment seems bound to embarrass, if not anger, Japanese officials, suggesting they have miscalculated the danger or deliberately played down the risks.
American officials who have been dealing with their Japanese counterparts report that the country’s political and bureaucratic leadership has appeared frozen in place, unwilling to communicate clearly about the problem’s scope and, in some cases, unwilling to accept outside assistance. Two American officials said they believed that the Japanese government itself was not getting a clear picture from Tokyo Electric.
VOLCANOES -
Fires still spreading from Hawaii volcano - Authorities say lava-ignited fires from the Kilauea volcano eruption in Hawaii continue to spread across Volcanoes National Park. Park firefighters said Wednesday that the blaze has now burned more than 1,166 acres since Sunday. They say the fire was sparked from the Kamoamoa eruption. The wind-driven fire is flowing through Ohia forest in an area that has been burned at least twice due to lava flows. Firefighting resources have been ordered from California and are expected to arrive by Friday. Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes, has been in constant eruption since Jan. 3, 1983.
TROPICAL STORMS -
No current tropical cyclones.
SEVERE RAIN STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES -
Nearly half of the United States is threatened with flooding this spring - The areas most at risk for major or RECORD-BREAKING flooding include the Upper Midwest down into parts of western Illinois and eastern Iowa, as well as portions of the Northeast. “For THE THIRD CONSECUTIVE YEAR, the stage is set for potential widespread, record flooding in the North Central United States." For example, in St. Paul, Minnesota, there is a 95% chance of major flooding, as well as a 50% chance of record-breaking flooding.
Forecasters are most concerned about communities such as Fargo, North Dakota and St. Paul, where severe flooding has occurred in recent years and the combination of an UNUSUALLY deep snowpack and above average precipitation in the coming weeks is likely to bring yet another major flooding event. The water content in some parts of the North Central states is currently ranked AMONG THE HIGHEST IN THE LAST 60 YEARS.
The rivers that forecasters say are most prone to flooding include the Red River, which comprises the border between eastern North Dakota and northwest Minnesota, the Milk River in eastern Montana, the Minnesota River, and the upper Mississippi River basin from Minneapolis southward to St. Louis, among others. “Many metropolitan areas have a greater than 95 percent chance of major flooding, including Fargo, Grand Forks, St. Paul, Davenport, Rock Island, Sioux Falls and Huron. The NOAA gives an 80 percent chance that Devils Lake in North Dakota will reach two feet above last year’s record level of 1452.1 feet.
How quickly temperatures warm during the spring, along with the amounts of any additional precipitation that may fall from storm systems, will help determine the magnitude, timing and extent of any flooding. NOAA’s spring outlook for April through June shows higher odds of above-average temperatures and below average precipitation across the southern U.S., and below average temperatures from the Pacific Northwest to the northern Plains. The drier than average conditions from Florida, along the Gulf Coast, and westward to the Southwestern states is projected to exacerbate existing drought conditions that have contributed to a recent spate of wildfires. “From the Southwest, across the South and northward to the mid-Atlantic, drought has been spreading and deepening since the winter and is forecast to persist in spring. Wildfires will be an increasing threat, especially when humidity is low and when winds are high."
The spring outlook takes into account the weakening of La Niña conditions in the equatorial tropical Pacific Ocean. La Niña, which is characterized by cooler than average water temperatures in this region, tends to have the most influence on winter weather, bringing wetter than average conditions to the Pacific Northwest and Ohio Valley, and drier and milder winters in the South. La Niña peaked in December and January, and is projected to be gone within the next month or two. However, its effects will linger in some places, particularly in the Pacific Northwest where a cool early spring can be anticipated. (maps)
