more then one nuke plant in Japan damaged - 5 reactors damaged

[ensho]

The plant is just south of the worst-hit Miyagi prefecture, where a fire broke out at another nuclear plant. The blaze was in a turbine building at one of the Onagawa power plants; smoke could be seen coming out of the building, which is separate from the plant's reactor, Tohoku Electric Power Co. said. It has since been extinguished. Another plant at Onagawa is experiencing a water leak.
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Russian sanitary and consumers rights watchdog ordered to closely monitor radiation levels in Russian Far East following controversial reports of possible leak from a nuclear reactor in Japan. Gennady Onishchenko, Russia's chief sanitary official, ordered to use all available equipment as the majority of Japanese NPPs ae situated along the coast, hit by a powerful quake and tsunami waves on Friday. "Almost all are located on man-made banks and islands," Onishchenko said. "Quite a few officially confirmed nuclear incidents occurred in the past few years in Japan, some of them caused nuclear-polluted gas and liquids to leak." "In the past years, about 20 accidents were registered, some even led to human casualties. We are worried about that," he said. Increased radiation levels were registered at the Fukushima nuclear plant in northeast Japan as power shortages caused the reactor to overheat, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)
said. People living within the 10-km range from the plant were told to evacuate. In some parts of the plant, radiation levels rose up to 1,000 times above the norm, and are about eight times above the norm outside the station, the Kyodo news agency said on Saturday.

The state of emergency was declared at the station. In an attempt to ease pressure which is building up inside the reactor, plant employees will perform a controlled release of radioactive gas from the reactor's containment structure on Saturday. Japanese official gave controversial comments on the accident. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano did not confirm reports of leak but said that emergency services "should be prepared for the worst-case scenario." In a phone conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said there were no signs that any radioactive substance leaked into the environment. But Japanese possible, the Kyodo agency said. Japan has more than 54 nuclear energy units in operation, and about one quarter of all energy produced in the country comes from nuclear power plants.
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NHK said the injured workers were in the process of cooling a nuclear reactor at the plant by injecting water into its core. Earlier Saturday Japan's nuclear agency said workers were continuing efforts to cool fuel rods at the plant after a small amount of radioactive material escaped into the air. The agency said there was a strong possibility that the radioactive cesium monitors detected was caused by the melting of a fuel rod at the plant, adding that engineers were continuing to cool the fuel rods by pumping water around them. A spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Agency earlier said atomic material had seeped out of one of the five nuclear reactors at the Daiichi plant, located about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo. Authorities evacuated people living near the reactor after an earthquake and tsunami crippled cooling systems there, as well as at another of the Tokyo Electric Power Company's nuclear plants. The evacuations notwithstanding, the
nuclear safety agency asserted Saturday that the radiation at the plants did not pose an immediate threat to nearby residents' health, the Kyodo News Agency said.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday on its website that the quake and tsunami knocked out a Daiichi reactor's off-site power source, which is used to cool down the radioactive material inside. Then, the tsunami waves disabled the backup source -- diesel generators -- and authorities were working to get these operating. On Saturday Japanese nuclear authorities said the cooling system had also failed at three of the four reactors at the Fukushima Daini plant -- located in another town in northeaster Japan's Fukushima prefecture. Janie Eudy told CNN that her 52-year-old husband, Joe, was working at the Daiichi plant and was injured by falling and shattering glass when the quake struck. As he and others were planning to evacuate, at their managers' orders, the tsunami waves struck and washed buildings from the nearby town past the plant. "To me, it sounded like hell on earth," she said, adding her husband -- a native of Pineville, Louisiana -- ultimately escaped.
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Ukraine on Saturday offered to send search and rescue teams to Japan and if needed to follow them up with nuclear accident control crews, reported DPA. "We have an aircraft ready to fly, now, with about 40 rescue experts and their search dogs," said Yulia Yershova, spokeswoman for Ukraine's Ministry of Emergency Situations. "We are waiting for a request from the Japanese side." Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych late Friday evening ordered his government to ready emergency response teams to be sent to Japan. Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a formal offer of assistance on Saturday morning. The top priority was helping to find people buried in rubble and providing them with food, shelter, and medical assistance. Repairing damaged infrastructure was also critical, according to Yanukovych's executive order. Talks were in progress between Ukrainian government agencies on readying teams able to assist with limiting the effects of a nuclear accident, should
Tokyo request it, Yershova said. Ukraine was the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power accident. Ukraine's Ministry of Emergency Situations has led the national effort for controlling the effects of radiation from the disaster.
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Japanese authorities will release slightly radioactive vapor to ease pressure at a disabled nuclear power plant reactor near Tokyo . Japan's nuclear safety agency said pressure inside one of six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had risen to 1.5 times the level considered normal, the Associated Press reports. The agency says the radioactive element in the vapor would not affect the environment or human health. Officials have declared Japan's first ever nuclear emergency and ordered the evacuation of 3,000 nearby residents as a precaution. The 40-year-old plant in Onahama, about 170 miles northeast of Tokyo, is not leaking radiation. ''We have a situation where one of the reactors (of the plant) cannot be cooled down,'' top government spokesman Yukio Edano said, according to Kyodo News. The U.S. government has sent over coolant for the nuclear plant aboard U.S. Air Force planes, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said today,
according to CNN.
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Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday's powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns. A single reactor in northeastern Japan had been the focus of much of the concern in the initial hours after the 8.9 magnitude quake, but the government declared new states of emergency at four other reactors in the area Saturday morning. The earthquake knocked out power at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and because a backup generator failed, the cooling system was unable to supply water to cool the 460-megawatt No. 1 reactor. Although a backup cooling system is being used, Japan's nuclear safety agency said pressure inside the reactor had risen to 1.5 times the level considered normal. Authorities said radiation levels had jumped 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1 and were measured at eight times
normal outside the plant. They expanded an earlier evacuation zone more than threefold, from 3 to 10 kilometers (2 miles to 6.2 miles). Some 3,000 people had been urged to leave their homes in the first announcement.
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Tokyo Elecric Power Co., or Tepco, reported a further radiation leak at one of its two nuclear power plants in Fukushima that were damaged by Friday's Japanese earthquake, Japan's Kyodo News said Saturday. The power company said the cooling-water mechanism at the No. 1 plant had temporaily failed. Tepco undertook operations to relaese pressure at the plants some 150 miles north of Tokyo, and Japanese officials had said some radiation leakage was possible.
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all of these reports came from email alerts from rsoe.com

[arikara]

1. Thank you for sharing

I didn't know they have so many of them. I do not understand why a country as prone to earthquakes would ever think of building nuclear plants but especially such a country who knows first hand the destructive force of this energy. Japan has a wealth of intelligent ingenious people who surely could have led the world in safe clean energy technology. I am so terribly saddened by what is happening there.