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IAEA director general Yukiya Amano says there might be limited core damage to one of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's reactors.
They are known as the "Fukushima 50" and two of them are missing after an explosion and fire at one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant yesterday and a new fire there today.
The latest fire, in No 4 reactor, is out but? Japan today temporarily suspended operations to save its stricken nuclear power plant from meltdown after a sudden spike in radiation made it too dangerous for the engineers to remain at the facility, the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says.
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Civil defence teams search for survivors in Otsuchi, Japan. Photo: Getty Images
He told a press conference this afternoon that workers at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant - a skeleton crew of about 50 to 70 - had temporarily stopped filling the troubled reactors with water.
A spokesman for the country’s nuclear safety agency said the workers were evacuated after radiation readings at the plant rose above 3000 microsieverts. Reuters reported that the workers had since resumed operations.
As rescue workers search for survivors after last Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami, and emergency crews and aid agencies try to cope with about half a million people left homeless, a handful of engineers are risking their lives to try to contain the nation's nuclear crisis.
Blowing off ... fire erupts from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima, 250 kilometres north of Toyko. Photo: Digital Globe
The workers, who were not identified, were in the turbine area of the No.4 reactor at the plant, which has been shaken by four reactor explosions since last Friday.
About 50 to 70 engineers remain at the site of the plant, after hundreds of other staff members were evacuated.
"You are the only ones who can resolve the crisis. Retreat is unthinkable," the Financial Times reported Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan as telling the crew.
While health experts said the population faced minimal risks from the current levels of radioactive material released, "there may be more significant risks for emergency workers on site".
"They are dealing with the occupational exposure, but not for the population at large," a health physics expert at the University of California at Davis, Jerrold Bushberg, told Reuters.
Kirby Kemper, a nuclear physics professor at Florida State University, said the engineers were the "real heroes".
"There are 40 people or so that are in the process of risking their lives trying to pump seawater into these plants. They are real heroes. If they get the plants full of seawater, then things will cool down and we'll be OK," Professor Kemper said.
For cancer risks to be elevated, exposure would have to exceed 100 millisieverts in a year, scientists said. To be lethal, the blast of radiation would have to top 5000 millisieverts, delivered in just minutes or hours.
Measurements at the damaged plants are now well below the lethal levels of 400 millisieverts an hour measured yesterday.
Yesterday, at that level, unprotected workers may have been exposed to about four times the level deemed to increase the risk for cancer, or 20 times the annual exposure for some nuclear-industry employees and uranium miners.
A second fire broke out at No.4 reactor about 5.45am today, national broadcaster NHK reported, quoting the facility's operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
A worker at the plant was carrying batteries to the central control room of reactor No.4 when he discovered smoke billowing from the building, a TEPCO spokesman said.
Workers could not enter the building to extinguish the fire, but it went out naturally after half an hour, TEPCO officials told NHK.
TEPCO said about 70 per cent of the fuel rods inside reactor No.1 and 33 per cent of the rods inside No.2 were damaged, the Kyodo news agency reported.
The cores of both reactors were believed to have partially melted after they lost their cooling functions following the quake and tsunami.
Reactor No.4, which was under maintenance when the quake hit, had all its nuclear fuel in a storage pool. The pool is normally used for spent fuel.
Workers have been unable to approach the pool because of the high radiation levels around it. On Monday, temperatures of 84 degrees Celsius were recorded at the pool, twice the normal levels. Further readings were not possible because of a technical fault, TEPCO said.
A representative of the safety agency also said there was a crack in the roof of the reactor building.
Authorities are desperately trying to prevent the water which is designed to cool the radioactive cores of the plant's reactors from running dry, which would lead to overheating and the potential release of dangerous radioactive material into the environment.
It was possible the water in the reactor was boiling, the agency said.
Yesterday, explosions and a fire at the plant unleashed dangerous levels of radiation around the facility.
The Prime Minister called for people living a further 10 kilometres from a 20-kilometre exclusion zone to stay indoors.
Japanese workers, who have been using fire-fighting equipment to pump seawater into the reactors, said they might pour water from helicopters to stop fuel rods from being exposed to the air and releasing even more radioactivity.
"We have no options other than to pour water from a helicopter, or to spray water from the ground," a spokesman for TEPCO said on television. "We have to take action tomorrow or the day after."
Authorities also said that higher-than-normal, but not harmful, radiation levels were detected in the capital, Tokyo, 250 kilometres to the south-west and the world's biggest urban area.
Frightened Tokyo residents filled outbound trains and rushed to shops to stock up on face masks and emergency supplies amid heightening fears of radiation heading their way, despite government warnings that panic buying could hurt its ability to provide aid to devastated areas.
An 'apocalypse'
Japan has continued to rate its escalating nuclear crisis at four on the seven-point international scale for nuclear accidents, behind the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States, which was rated five, and the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with was rated seven.
But France's Nuclear Safety Authority said the disaster now equated to a six on the scale, ranking the crisis second only in gravity to Chernobyl.
Europe's Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger dubbed the nuclear disaster an "apocalypse", saying Tokyo had almost lost control of events at the Fukushima plant.
"There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen," he said in remarks to the European Parliament.
'Is it a crack? Is it a hole? Is it nothing?'
The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, has also said there might be limited core damage at reactor No.2 - calling it "very worrying".
Yukiya Amano said he wanted more timely and detailed information from Japan - his first hint at frustration with the pace of updates from authorities in his home country.
"The problem is very complicated; we do not have all the details of the information so what we can do is limited," Mr Amano told a news conference. "I am trying to further improve the communication."
"Is it a crack? Is it a hole? Is it nothing? That we don't know yet," he said.
But he said the pressure in the containment vessel had not fallen.
"If there is huge damage, the pressure should go down."
Japanese media have criticised the government's handling of the disaster and TEPCO for its failure to provide enough information.
Mr Amano said the Vienna-based UN agency planned to send a small team of experts to Japan, possibly to help with environmental monitoring.
He spoke as after a blast blew a hole in the building housing the No.4 reactor, which meant spent nuclear fuel was exposed to the atmosphere.
He said a storage pond with almost 800 spent fuel assemblies - which are highly radioactive - caught fire for about two hours before the blaze was extinguished.
Australians in Japan
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said that, as of 6.30am (AEDT) today, 144 Australians believed to be in the disaster areas remained unaccounted for.
A spokeswoman said 3230 Australians, with 119 in the affected regions and including those who were not registered with DFAT, had been confirmed as safe.
There have been no reports of Australian victims, the spokeswoman added.
The overall death toll from the disaster has risen above 3300, with more than 6700 people still unaccounted for.
Travel advice updated
Australia has updated its travel advice for Japan, with the Department of Health and Ageing and Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) stating that the "risk of health effects from exposure at these low levels is considered very low to negligible" for Australians who were in the Fukushima area.
"For those Australians in Japan but outside the affected areas, based on current information, ARPANSA advises that they are extremely unlikely to be contaminated and the health risks are negligible.
"Given the very low risk of exposure, ARPANSA advises that people should have no physical symptoms. If there is any doubt about contamination this contamination is easily removed by washing your body and clothes."
Other governments, including Britain, Italy and the Netherlands, issued travel warnings.
Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned this morning against travel to quake-hit Japan, but added that "there are no plans for an evacuation at this time".
Flights re-routed
Some flights to Japan were halted or re-routed and air travellers were avoiding Tokyo for fear of radiation.
Lufthansa said it was diverting flights away from Tokyo to Osaka and Nagoya, at least until the weekend. It said planes returning from Tokyo on Monday were not contaminated.
Air China said it had cancelled flights to Tokyo from Beijing and Shanghai, mainly due to lack of operational capacity at some airports.
US aviation authorities said they were prepared to take action, including re-routing flights to Japan, if the nuclear crisis worsened.
Gripped by fear
In the only country in the world to have experienced a nuclear attack - two bombs dropped by the United States during World War II killed some 200,000 people - Japanese citizens are gripped by dread of nuclear catastrophe.
"What we most fear is a radiation leak from the nuclear plant," Kaoru Hashimoto, 36, a housewife living in Fukushima city, 80 kilometres north-west of the stricken plant, said.
Ms Hashimoto said supermarkets were open but shelves were bare.
"Many children are sick in this cold weather, but pharmacies are closed. Emergency relief goods have not reached evacuation centres in the city.
"Everyone is anxious and wants to get out of town, but there is no more petrol," she said.
Survivors found four days after quake
Aid workers and search teams from across the world joined 100,000 Japanese soldiers in a massive relief push in the tsunami-hit areas.
In a rare piece of good news, rescuers pulled two survivors, an elderly woman and a man, from underneath the rubble, four days after the earthquake, public broadcaster NHK reported.
But millions have been left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food, and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and facing harsh conditions with freezing temperatures overnight, with snow and rain forecast.
The devastation in tsunami-hit areas such as Sendai city is absolute.
At the once-bustling regional airport, small planes jutted out at awkward angles from thick mud amid the wreckage of clusters of wooden beachfront houses that were splintered into flotsam in an instant by the waves.
The machinery of modern life has been crumpled almost beyond recognition as far as the eye can see - cars are stuck incongruously into the few remaining structures or balanced on top of wrecked homes.
- with agencies
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