Radioactivity soars inside Japanese reactor

Reactors No. 1 to 4 are seen at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant in Fukushima in this satellite file image, taken and released by DigitalGlobe March 18, 2011

Japanese authorities evacuated workers on Sunday from a reactor building they were working in after radiation in water at the crippled nuclear power plant reached potentially lethal levels, the plant’s operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co said radiation in the water of the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was measured at more than 1,000 millisieverts an hour. That compares with a national safety standard of 250 millisieverts over a year. The US Environmental Protection Agency says a dose of 1,000 millisieverts is enough to cause hemorrhaging.

Japanese nuclear regulators said the water contained 10 million times the amount of radioactive iodine than is normal in the reactor, but noted the substance had a half life of less than an hour, meaning it would disappear within a day.

A Tokyo Electric official said workers were evacuated from the No. 2 reactor’s turbine housing unit to prevent them from being exposed to harmful doses of radiation. They had been trying to pump radioactive water out of the power station after it was found in buildings housing three of the six reactors.

Tokyo Electric engineers have struggled the past two weeks to prevent a catastrophic meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, after an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami knocked out the backup power system needed to cool the reactors.

The work has had to be suspended several times due to explosions and spiking radiation levels inside the reactors, in a crisis that has become the worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl a quarter-century ago.

On Thursday, three workers were taken to hospital from reactor No. 3 after stepping in water with radiation levels 10,000 times higher than usually found in a reactor.

The latest radiation scare was confined to inside the reactor. Radiation levels in the air beyond the evacuation zone around the plant and in Tokyo have been in normal ranges.

Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), cautioned that the nuclear emergency could go on for weeks, if not months more.

"This is a very serious accident by all standards," he told the New York Times. "And it is not yet over."

Radiation levels in the sea off the Fukushima Daiichi plant rose on Sunday to 1,850 times normal just over two weeks after the disaster struck, from 1,250 on Saturday, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

"Ocean currents will disperse radiation particles and so it will be very diluted by the time it gets consumed by fish and seaweed," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a senior agency official.

Several countries have banned produce and milk from Japan’s nuclear crisis zone and are monitoring Japanese seafood over fears of radioactive contamination.

Overshadowing relief effort

The crisis at the plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, has overshadowed a relief and recovery effort from the magnitude 9.0 quake and the huge tsunami it triggered on March 11 that left more than 27,100 people dead or missing in northeast Japan.

The Japanese government estimated last week the material damage from the catastrophe could top $300 billion, making it the world’s costliest natural disaster.

In addition, power cuts have disrupted production while the drawn-out battle to prevent a meltdown at the 40-year-old plant has hurt consumer confidence and spread contamination fears well beyond Japan.

Amano, a former Japanese diplomat who made a trip to Japan after the quake, said authorities were still unsure about whether the plant’s reactor cores and spent fuel were covered with the water needed to cool them.

He told the newspaper he saw a few "positive signs" with the restoration of some electric power to the plant, adding: "More efforts should be done to put an end to the accident."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it was time to reassess the international atomic safety regime.

Japan’s nuclear crisis also looks set to claim its first, and unlikely, political casualty. In far away Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party faces a defeat in a key state on Sunday, largely because of her policy U-turns on nuclear power.

Not worsening

A Tokyo Electric official told a news conference on Saturday experts were still trying to figure out where to put the contaminated water they’re trying to pump out of the reactors.

They also are not sure where the radiation is leaking from – whether it’s from the spent fuel rod pools or elsewhere in the reactors.

"That’s the problem they have right now, is trying to figure out where this comes from," said Murray Jennex, associate professor at San Diego State University.

"You let (radioactive) stuff accumulate because you don’t have a place to put it. It stays down in the bottom of the plant. If nothing happens, when it comes time to shut it down you clean it up and take care of it. But if something like this happens, that stuff now becomes loose sometimes."

Two of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors are now seen as safe but the other four are volatile, occasionally emitting steam and smoke.

"We are preventing the situation from worsening," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference on Saturday. "We’ve restored power and pumped in fresh water, and are making basic steps toward improvement, but there is still no room for complacency."

At Chernobyl in Ukraine, the worst nuclear accident in the world, it took weeks to "stabilize" what remained of the reactor that exploded and months to clean up radioactive materials and cover the site with a concrete and steel sarcophagus.

In Tokyo, a metropolis of 13 million, a Reuters reading on Sunday morning showed ambient radiation of 0.06 microsieverts per hour, well within the global average of naturally occurring background radiation of 0.17-0.39 microsieverts per hour, a range given by the World Nuclear Association.

Source: Reuters 

US halts Japan food imports, Tokyo water contaminated

A Japanese tsunami survivor stands in front of messages displayed on the wall of a relief center in Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture.

Japanese authorities advised against allowing infants to drink tap water in Tokyo due to raised radiation levels and the United States became the first nation to block some food imports from Japan.

The crisis at the tsunami-smashed nuclear power plant, 250 km (150 miles) north of the Japanese capital, appeared far from over with workers attempting to gain control ordered to leave the site after black smoke began rising from one of its six reactors.

The plant was crippled by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11. Some 23,000 people have been left dead or missing.

Tokyo authorities said water at a purification plant for the capital of 13 million people had 210 becquerels of radioactive iodine – more than twice the safety level for infants.

"This is without doubt, an effect of the Fukushima Daiichi plant," a Tokyo metropolitan government official said, referring to the nuclear power station.

Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, however, said the radiation level posed no immediate health risk and water could still be used.

"But for infants under age one, I would like them to refrain from using tap water to dilute baby formula," he said.

International concerns about food safety are growing, with the United States the latest to impose controls. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was stopping imports of milk, vegetable and fruit from four prefectures in the vicinity of the crippled nuclear plant.

South Korea may be next to ban Japanese food after the world’s worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. France this week asked the European Commission to look into harmonizing controls on radioactivity in imports from Japan.

Food made up just 0.6 percent of Japan’s total exports last year.

Authorities said above-safety radiation levels had been discovered in 11 types of vegetables from the area, in addition to milk and water.

Officials still insisted, however, that there was no major danger to humans and urged the world not to over react.

"We will explain to countries the facts and we hope they will take logical measures based on them," Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano, who has been the government’s public face during the disaster, told a news conference.

Japan has already halted shipment of some food from the area and told people there to stop eating leafy vegetables. Asian neighbors are inspecting imports for contamination, and Taiwan advised boats to stop fishing in Japanese waters.

At the Fukushima plant, engineers are battling to cool reactors to contain further contamination and avert a meltdown.

But they were ordered out on Wednesday when black smoke began rising from the No.3 reactor, the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, said. It said it did not know what was causing the smoke.

The Asian nation’s worst crisis since World War Two may have caused $300 billion damage and has sent shock waves through global financial markets.

More than a quarter of a million people are living in shelters, while rescuers and sniffer dogs comb debris and mud looking for corpses and personal mementoes.

Drama at Fukushima

Technicians working inside an evacuation zone around the plant have successfully attached power cables to all six reactors and started a pump at one to cool overheating fuel rods.

As well as having its workers on the front line in highly dangerous circumstances, TEPCO is also facing accusations of a slow disaster response and questions over why it originally stored more uranium at the plant than it was designed to hold.

Vienna-based U.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), expressed concern about a lack of information from Japanese authorities. It cited missing data on temperatures of spent fuel pools at the facility’s reactors 1, 3 and 4.

"We continue to see radiation coming from the site … and the question is where exactly is that coming from?" said a senior IAEA official, James Lyons.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was concerned about radioactive fallout affecting the U.S. 55,000 troops in and around Japan, many involved in a massive relief operation for Washington’s close ally. "We’re also deeply concerned about the wellbeing of our Japanese allies," he said.

Worsened by widespread ignorance of the technicalities of radiation, public concern is rising around the world and radioactive particles have been found as far away as Iceland.

Experts said tiny traces of radioactive particles, measured by a network of monitoring stations as they spread eastwards from Japan across the Pacific, North America, the Atlantic and to Europe, were far too low to cause any harm to humans.

"It’s only a matter of days before it disperses in the entire northern hemisphere," said Andreas Stohl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research

Global Impact

The Japan crisis has dealt a blow to the nuclear power industry around the world. Italy became the latest nation to re-assess its program, announcing a one-year moratorium on site selection and building of plants.

Crisis in the world’s third-biggest economy – and its key position in global supply chains, especially for the auto and technology sectors – has added to global market jitters, also affected by conflict in Libya and unrest in the Middle East.

Asian shares fell on Wednesday, with Tokyo’s Nikkei ending 1.65 percent down as investors took profits from a two-session bounce. Japanese stocks are about 8 percent below their close on the day the big quake struck.

Toyota said it would delay the launch in Japan of two additions to the Prius line-up, a wagon and a minivan, from the originally planned end-April due to production disruptions.

The tsunami and earthquake are the world’s costliest ever natural disaster, with the government estimating damage at 15-25 trillion yen ($185 billion-$308 billion).

The upper end of that range would equate to about 6 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.

The official death toll has risen to 9,199, but with 13,786 people still reported missing, it is certain to rise.

There are reports dozens of survivors, mostly elderly, have died in hospitals and evacuation centers due to a lack of proper treatment, or simply because of the cold.

Desperate municipalities are digging mass graves, unthinkable in a nation where the dead are usually cremated and their ashes placed in stone family tombs near Buddhist temples.

"This is a special measure, but there is nothing much else we can do," said Kazuhiko Endo, an official in Kamaishi town, where a mass burial is planned on Friday for 150 unidentified people.

"More than a week has passed since we placed them in morgues and we don’t know if they can be identified."

Source: Reuters 

PM calls for stronger welfare program to fight crisis

Teachers and students at a makeshift classroom in the village of Muong Ly, considered one of the poorest villages in Muong Lat District, Thanh Hoa Province.

The social welfares ministry should beef up its social welfare programs in preparation for the economic difficulties that the nation will have to face next year, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said Sunday.

He said the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs should ensure additional support for the poor, increase the numbers of skilled labor and have policies to assist the unemployed.

The premier was addressing a meeting organized in Ho Chi Minh City over the weekend to discuss its plans for 2009.

He said economic problems next year would affect social issues, so fighting the downturn was among the main tasks.

Dung instructed the ministry to expedite implementation of its plans, including poverty alleviation support for 61 poorest districts nationwide, building houses for the poor, providing unemployment insurance, and vocational training for the unemployed.

Earlier, the Government had earmarked VND3 trillion (US$177.4 million) for the 61 poorest districts and VND3.5 trillion ($207 million) for building homes for the poor.

The PM also instructed the ministry to find effective solutions for laborers who lose their jobs under the impact of the economic downturn, and pass regulations on employers’ responsibilities toward their workers.

The country should target having 50 percent of its labor force trained by 2010 through vocational training programs, to eliminate poverty, he said.

“The current statistics of 35 percent of trained labor cannot achieve high productivity and competitiveness of quality products.”

Dung also said the government, MOLISA and other ministries should support enterprises and ensure employment by lowering bank interest rates and reducing taxes.

Solving unemployment

Small and medium enterprises would benefit from low interest rate loans to maintain production and retain their employees, the Minister of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, said on Saturday.

She said such loans would favor those enterprises with a large number of employees and would focus on the sectors with high risk of unemployment, including textile and apparel, leather shoes, food processing and agricultural products.

Local authorities should monitor difficulties facing the enterprises to offer timely support, especially to those with a high possibility of retrenching employees or being unable to pay salaries.

The labor ministry recently issued a policy to create a pool of trained labor to meet the demand of enterprises, and has already disbursed VND72 billion ($4.26 million) for this effort.

Minister Ngan also said the government’s move to raise workers’ basic salary and offer unemployment insurance from next month was aimed at reducing the difficulties faced by employees. She noted that 300,000 laborers could lose their jobs in 2009.

Ngan said the Ministry had also established a fund to support exported laborers being jobless due to impacts of global downturn on other countries.

Early this month, around 200 workers had to return from Taiwan after their contracts were annulled.

However, Ngan said concerned agencies would continue to improve laborers’ skills toward maintaining the target of sending 1.7 million workers abroad in 2009.

The foreign exchange remitted by overseas workers was around $1.7 billion last year, and was an important source of funds in the nation’s efforts to eliminate poverty, she added.

Source: Agencies

Grim economic data puts crisis summit in spotlight

A vendor sleeps on cabbages while waiting for customers at a vegetable market in Taiyuan, Shanxi province Tuesday.

Weak economic readings from China, Japan and Britain and a grim corporate outlook worldwide reinforced fears Tuesday of a prolonged recession, prompting investors to look to a world leaders’ summit for solutions.

Chinese import growth slowed in October and inflation fell to a 17-month low as domestic demand cooled, making it likely Beijing will cut interest rates soon to back up the government’s new economic stimulus plan.

“The increasing risk of deflation will make the central bank more aggressive in loosening monetary policy,” said Hu Yuexiao, an analyst with Shanghai Securities.

In Japan, exports fell nearly 10 percent in the first 20 days of October, corporate bankruptcies jumped 13.4 percent year-on-year and sentiment in its service sector hit an all-time low, all signs the world’s second biggest economy was teetering on the brink of recession.

German analyst and investor sentiment about the outlook for Europe’s largest economy improved but the ZEW survey, which measures the ratio of optimists to pessimists, still read -53.5, reflecting a large preponderance of the latter.

British retail sales fell by the biggest amount in more than three years last month, and a housing industry survey showed home sales slumped to their lowest level in at least 30 years.

“These are seriously poor numbers, especially in the run-up to Christmas,” Stephen Robertson, director general of the British Retail Consortium, said of the sales data.

The worst financial crisis in 80 years, prompted by huge banking losses in the US housing market, has now created a broad economic downturn, with even fast-growing China proving not to be immune.

Brown demands summit action

The credit crunch has seen banks clam up on lending to each other, businesses and households for over a year now.

Investors are looking to a summit of world leaders in Washington on Saturday for new solutions, following moves worldwide to cut interest rates, kick-start money markets and recapitalize banks at a cost of more than US$4 trillion.

“We need monetary and fiscal policy coordination across the world… a broad, concerted economic response is now urgent,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a news conference. “The second priority is that we agree on a timetable for measures that will clean up the failings in our banking system.”

But officials are downplaying the likelihood of dramatic measures and aides to US President-elect Barack Obama – who world leaders have urged to make the credit crisis his number one priority – said he would not attend the November 15 summit.

Many in Europe want a root-and-branch reform of financial regulation but US officials have sounded more reluctant.

“Major reactions in the market may be delayed until after the outcome of the G20 meeting at the weekend,” said Hideki Amikura, deputy general manager of the forex section at Nomura Trust Bank.

Obama is expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a fiscal stimulus package once he takes power in January.

Corporate pain

Inevitably, companies are not escaping unscathed.

Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone company by revenue, cut its full-year revenue outlook for the second time in four months but said it would maintain profits by cutting 1 billion pounds ($1.58 billion) in costs.

Samsung Securities Co, South Korea’s biggest brokerage, reported a 69 percent fall in quarterly net profit on the back of falling financial markets.

The world’s largest hotelier, InterContinental Hotels, posted a 14 percent rise in third-quarter profits but said it saw a sharp deterioration in October market conditions.

Investors, spooked by worries about the worsening corporate outlook, sold shares. Japan’s Nikkei share index dropped 3 percent and European stocks shed 2.3 percent at the open.

Monday’s optimism, sparked by China’s nearly $600 billion stimulus package, quickly evaporated.

“Worrying corporate news from the US plus suggestions that the recession will be longer and deeper than previously thought are adding to the downside,” Matt Buckland, dealer at CMC Markets, wrote in a note.

Deutsche Bank said the equity value of General Motors was now zero, sending its stock to a 62-year low, and analysts said Goldman Sachs could post its first quarterly loss.

US electronics seller Circuit City filed for bankruptcy – the biggest retailer to do so since Kmart in 2002 – and coffee chain Starbucks reported disappointing earnings.

The New York Times reported Obama urged President George W. Bush to back immediate emergency aid for car makers at their first post-election meeting at the White House.

Source: Reuters