The nuclear crisis in Japan escalated on Tuesday after a new explosion and fire broke out at Fukushima’s plant #1, where successive accidents since Friday's earthquake have probably caused more than 10,000 deaths.
This sequence of events has raised strong fears of radioactive contamination in the archipelago, as well as in neighboring countries such as Russia and China.
As a precaution, Prime Minister Naoto Kan has expanded the security zone around the plant by asking for people within a radius of 30 km to remain indoors, close their windows, turn off any fans and to keep their clothes on. This is in addition to the evacuation of more than 200,000 people living near the plant on the northeast coast of the Pacific Ocean.
Tensions rose in Tokyo when the level of radioactivity was slightly above normal by midday before falling again in the afternoon. There are 35 million people in the Greater Tokyo area.
Reactors # 2 and # 4 had hydrogen explosions as a result of emergency operations undertaken to compensate for the failure of the cooling systems within the reactors to function properly due to the tsunami and the ensuing 9.0 magnitude earthquake.
Andre-Claude Lacoste, president of the French Nuclear Safety Authority, said that the accident at Fukushima could be the second worst in the world, since it would reach a severity level of 6 on a scale of international nuclear and radiological events, which is 7.
Günther Oettinger, the European Commissioner for Energy, spoke of an ‘apocalypse’ saying that local authorities had virtually lost control of the situation in Fukushima.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced an immediate halt for three months of the seven oldest reactors in the country. The EU countries have decided to test their ability to resist earthquakes, tsunamis, tidal and terrorist attacks while Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered a study on the sector in Russia .
In the US, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, says the U.S. was set on including nuclear power in its energy mix,but that the administration was committed to learning from Japan's experience. He told a House Appropriations Committee panel today that his department had sent 34 people and 7,200 pounds of equipment to the scene of the crippled reactors from which radiation had leaked.
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