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11.31am: The Associated Press has more details on the state of emergency issued at nuclear plant after its cooling system failed:
Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano says the nuclear power plant in Fukushima developed a mechanical failure in the system needed to cool the reactor after it was shut down in Friday's earthquake.
He said the measure was a precaution and there was no radiation leak at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. He said the facility was not in immediate danger.
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Thats pretty bloody serious.... eeeek![]()
I pray that this will not turn into another Chernobyl situation.
how far is Sendai from Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
so much radiation!!!![]()
I pray that this will not turn into another Chernobyl situation.
how far is Sendai from Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
so much radiation!!!![]()
Keep the tasteless joke posts out of here.
As someone knowing people in Fukushima and Sendai who lost everything but their lives yesterday (though one guy's cat was killed), these posts are crap, and I have already reported two, and will continue to do so.
Keep it clean, this isn't the time to be joking, and it's pretty tasteless, about as bad as CNN's Godzilla jokes; sometimes I wonder if it just doesn't register with people just because it didn't happen to them.
This is the worst devastation Japan has seen in a few hundred years.
Considering how terrible this is, having (so far) a mere thousand or two dead/missing (almost all so far being a result of the tsunami and not the quake itself) is a miracle, and a testament to the warning systems, the building codes and construction, and the seriousness with which these issues are taken by the Japanese and the preparedness they show.
Times like this I truly admire the Japanese. And, like Kobe after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, Japan will rebuild better, more beautifully, more gracefully, and be stronger than ever, in just a few years' time. Kobe is absolutely stunning today, and in time so too will Sendai be. Japan will not treat this like Katrina.
Guys,
Please stop speculating about the situation of the Japanese nuclear reactors, protocols, and regulations, or how they--those specific ones--work.
Unless you are an expert with a background in chemical/nuclear engineering, and an expert not only on just nuclear reactors but also Japanese nuclear regulations, then you aren't really in a place to criticize from halfway around the world. We derive 30% of our power from nuclear reactors, we know what we are doing. We aren't unnecessarily paranoid about nuclear power like the west is.
We know very little about the situation with the Japanese reactors, and even less about the reactors themselves.
Comparing them to the 30+ year old standards of the impoverished USSR is rather inappropriate.
Keep it clean, this isn't the time to be joking, and it's pretty tasteless, about as bad as CNN's Godzilla jokes; sometimes I wonder if it just doesn't register with people just because it didn't happen to them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12720219An explosion has been heard from a Japanese nuclear power plant hit by Friday's devastating earthquake.
Reports said smoke was seen coming from the plant at Fukushima and several workers were injured.
Japanese officials fear a meltdown at one of the plant's reactors after radioactive material was detected outside it.
A huge relief operation is under way after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 600.
Hundreds more people are missing and it is feared about 1,300 may have died.
Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan declared a state of emergency at the Fukushima 1 and 2 power plants as engineers try to confirm whether a reactor at one of the stations has gone into meltdown.
Japan's NHK TV showed before and after pictures of the Fukushima plant. They appeared to show that the outer structure of one of four buildings at the plant had collapsed.
Cooling systems inside several reactors at the plants stopped working after Friday's earthquake cut the power supply.
Japan's nuclear agency said on Saturday that radioactive caesium and iodine had been detected near the number one reactor of the Fukushima 1 plant.
The agency said this may indicate that containers of uranium fuel inside the reactor may have begun melting.