This is one of the reasons i have always been leery of nuclear power. There are too many
possibilities of natural as well as terrorist disasters to feel entirely comfortable with this form of energy in my opinion.
Japanese nuclear reactors in peril, radiation surges after earthquake, tsunami.
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 11, 2011; 9:29 PM
Japanese authorities declared a state of emergency Saturday for five nuclear reactors at two quake-stricken power plants as military and utility officials scrambled to tame rising pressure and radioactivity levels inside the units and stabilize the facilities used to cool the plants' hot reactor cores.
Radiation surged to around 1,000 times the normal level in the control room of one reactor, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said. Meanwhile, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Saturday that the temperatures at two other reactors at a different power station were rising and that it had lost control over pressure in the reactors.
Though no significant release of radioactivity had taken place, the earthquake, which forced the automatic shutdown of 11 of the country's 55 nuclear power plants, is certain to rattle confidence in nuclear power in Japan, where people have long been sensitized to the dangers of radioactivity releases, and in the United States, where foes of nuclear power were already pointing to the Japan crisis as a warning sign.
The closure of the plants, representing nearly 20 percent of the country's capacity, also deals an economic blow to Japan, which relies on nuclear power for one-third of its electricity generation.
"It's a very serious situation for the reactors and might ultimately render those reactors unusable," said Howard Shaffer, a former Navy submarine engineer and a member of the public information committee of the American Nuclear Society.
Japanese authorities initially evacuated about 3,000 residents living within a 1.9-mile radius of the Fukushima Daiichi plant on the east coast about 200 miles north of Tokyo and south of the heavily damaged town of Sendai. Later they widened that evacuation to a six-mile radius. People within a 16.2-mile radius were told to remain indoors, according to the Web site of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Incident and Emergency Centre.
Tokyo Electric Power, which owns the Fukushima Daiichi complex, said later that it was also having trouble controlling three of the four reactors it owns at its nearby Fukushima Daina plant.
NISA said no dangerous radioactivity had been released, but the government took the unusual step of evacuating nonetheless.
The problems at the nuclear plants came in waves, starting with two of the six Daiichi units.
The earthquake disrupted the electric power the reactors normally use to run their cooling facilities, which pump water into the reactor core to cool the spent fuel there. The reactors switched to backup diesel generators, but the tsunami then swept in and shut down the generators used for the No. 2 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi. The unit then tapped excess steam in the core to power a turbine and switched to battery power, which would last only a few hours.
"There's a basic cooling system that requires power, which they don't have," said Glenn McCullough, former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who was tracking the Japan situation.
Utility and Japanese government officials raced to get another generator to the site to prevent a possible partial meltdown similar to what took place in 1979 at Three Mile Island. By Saturday morning they said they had succeeded. The utility said it had restored power from the grid, but the IAEA said power was restored from "mobile electricity supplies."