U.S. Begins Airlift as Japan Battles Nuclear Reactor Leaks

The U.S. began airlifting citizens from Japan along with military and diplomatic families as authorities struggled to contain leaks from the quake-stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant.

The U.S., U.K. and Australia raised their alert levels, telling nationals to keep at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from the Dai-Ichi facility. Walt Disney Co. suspended operations in Tokyo, while British Airways became the latest carrier to pull crews out of the city, which lies about 135 miles to the south of the reactors.

Shortages of fuel, water and food assailed Fukushima, a city of 290,000 in the shadow of an unfolding nuclear crisis. Helicopters doused 30 metric tons of water on pools used to cool spent fuel rods yesterday. A bid to spray water onto the No. 3 reactor may have worked, a Tokyo Electric Power Co. official said at a briefing. The company is also trying to connect a power cable to the plant.

“New challenges are crashing down on us one after another,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said yesterday in Tokyo. “We will overcome these difficulties through extreme effort and meet the expectations of our people, who are remaining calm.”

The magnitude-9 earthquake that hit March 11 sparked a 7- meter (23-foot) tsunami that engulfed Japan’s northeast coast and knocked out cooling systems at the Dai-Ichi plant. There were 6,406 confirmed dead, with 10,259 missing as of 11 a.m. Tokyo time, the National Police Agency said.

Hong Kong Flights

Hong Kong’s government urged its residents living in Tokyo to return home or move to southern Japan “due to the evolving situation.” The city is arranging for additional flights to leave from Tokyo’s Narita airport, its government said in a statement posted on its website yesterday evening.

The U.S. government evacuated 97 citizens, including family members of employees, to Taiwan from Japan, according to Sheila Paskman, a spokeswoman for the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto embassy on the island. Another flight of evacuees will leave later today to Taiwan or Seoul, Paskman said by telephone from Taipei today.

Societe Generale SA, France’s second-largest bank, said it was assisting foreign employees and their families to leave Japan if they wished to do so, while allowing local staff to work from home or relocate. Blackstone Group LP and BNP Paribas SA were among companies that shifted operations from Tokyo.

Aftershocks, Blackouts

“There are still aftershocks, we have the rolling blackouts in our area and concern about the radiation,” Keith Cash, a preschool teacher at the U.S. Atsugi air base, said as he prepared to put his wife and four children on a plane back to the U.S. “All of those things put together have really forced us to decide that we want to have them go back.”

The Group of Seven agreed to jointly intervene in the foreign exchange market for the first time in more than a decade after Japan’s currency soared, according to a joint statement today following a conference call of the nations’ finance ministers and central bank chiefs. The quake triggered a drop in global stocks and drove the yen to a post-World War II high.

Japan’s benchmark Topix index rose 2.1 percent at 2:24 p.m., curtailing its loss since the disaster to 10 percent. In the U.S., investor speculation that Japan will contain the nuclear crisis contributed to a stock rally that broke a three-day losing streak for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The iShares MSCI Japan Index Fund tracking 323 securities rose 4.6 percent, following a 14 percent slump over the previous five days.

Obama Assures U.S.

President Barack Obama said he’s “confident” that Japan will rebuild and recover. At the White House later in the day, Obama said that the U.S. faces no danger of “harmful levels of radiation” reaching the country or its Pacific territories and that he has ordered a “comprehensive review” of safety at domestic nuclear plants.

Power may be restored to one of the crippled reactors at Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant by this afternoon, improving the odds that workers can prevent a meltdown and further radiation leaks.

In Fukushima city, the capital of the prefecture that is home to the plant, long lines formed at gas stations, most restaurants and supermarkets were shut and there was no running water. Radiation levels have declined to safe levels for workers, Japanese government spokesman Yukio Edano said.

May Take Weeks

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said yesterday there is a possibility of no water at the No. 4 reactor’s spent- fuel cooling pool. If exposed to air, the fuel rods could decay, catch fire and spew radioactive materials into the air. The plant has six reactors, three of which have been damaged by explosions following the quake.

The situation “will take some time, possibly weeks” to resolve, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko told reporters in Washington yesterday. “There clearly appears to be a challenge keeping that spent fuel filled with sufficient water.” Based on the NRC’s advice, the U.S. urged Americans within a 50-mile radius of the plant to leave.

The U.S. chartered 14 buses that are en route to the Sendai area for U.S. residents and tourists who wish to leave, Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy said. Those buses will take U.S. citizens to Tokyo for flights out of Japan.

There are an estimated 350,000 U.S. citizens in Japan, including about 90,000 in the Tokyo area, Kennedy said.

Consider Departing

U.S. nationals “in Japan should consider departing,” the State Department said in an e-mailed statement.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said it has intensified efforts to detect radiation on flights arriving from Japan and has found no dangerous levels for passengers or cargo.

The U.K. government is also hiring planes to take its nationals to Hong Kong, the Foreign Office said on its website.

Australia recommended that its citizens stay away from the northern part of Honshu island and Tokyo unless their presence is essential. France, Germany and China were among countries that urged nationals to leave Japan.

In 2009, the latest data available, there were 66,876 U.S. and Canadian citizens registered with Japan’s Justice Ministry, along with 16,597 Britons and 14,179 from Australia and New Zealand. China had 680,518 residents and the Philippines 211,716.

Fear that radiation would spread through the region sparked panic-buying in China. Shoppers cleared shelves of salt, viewed as a defense against radiation exposure.

--With assistance from Takahiko Hyuga, Yukiko Hagiwara, Takashi Hirokawa and Anna Kitanaka in Tokyo, Naoko Fujimura and Makiko Kitamura in Osaka, Michael Forsythe in Beijing, Bomi Lim in Seoul, Nicholas Johnston and Roger Runningen in Washington, and Ben Richardson in Hong Kong. Editors: Chitra Somayaji, Russell Ward

Destruction and radiation danger in aftermath of the Japan earthquake

An awful realization is setting in for those trapped in the vicinity of the crippled Fukushima nuclear complex: People are afraid to help them.

Residents describe spooky scenes of municipal cars driving down near-empty streets telling people to stay indoors, but they've seen few other signs of outside help.

Aid agencies are reluctant to get too close to the plant. Shelters set up in the greater Fukushima area for "radiation refugees" have little food, in part because nobody wants to deliver to an area that might be contaminated. And with little or no gasoline available, not everyone who wants to leave can get out.

Radiation fears mingled with a sickening sense of abandonment Wednesday.

"People who don't have family nearby, who are old or sick in bed, or couldn't get gasoline, they haven't been able to get away from the radiation," said Emi Shinkawa, who feels doubly vulnerable. Her house was swept away by the tsunami.

Her daughter, Tomoko Monma, knows she's lucky: At 9 a.m. Wednesday, she piled her family into the car, thankful for her husband's foresight in setting aside enough gasoline for them to make their escape.

But she's angry that people living outside the 12-mile evacuation zone around the nuclear plant weren't given help finding public transportation or the gasoline to drive away in their own cars. Monma lives 21 miles from the plant.

"We've gotten no help. We've gotten no information," said Monma, 28, who sat cradling her thumb-sucking 2-year-old daughter on the tatami mats that had been laid out in a sports center in Yamagata, 100 miles inland, which now serves as a shelter for people fleeing Fukushima.

"The government is demanding that we don't go out, but it isn't bringing us anything," Katsunobu Sakurai, the mayor of a city close to the exclusion zone, complained in an interview with the national NHK television network. "Truck drivers don't want to enter the city. They're afraid of being exposed to radiation…. If the government says we're in a dangerous area, it should take more care of us!"

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned American citizens Wednesday that they should move at least 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant, which is leaking significant amounts of radioactivity. That warning is significantly stronger than the Japanese government's warning to keep 12 miles away.

Foreign aid workers in the area have been assessing the radiation risks, but many chose to remain just outside the 12-mile zone Thursday morning.

Casey Calamusa, a communications officer with Federal Way, Wash.-based World Vision who is coordinating the operation in Tokyo, said a three-member team went to Fukushima on Wednesday to distribute supplies such as water, blankets and diapers at an evacuation center. The team was equipped with protective masks and suits and stayed outside the exclusion zone, he said.

"They were playing it pretty safe. They were talking to local authorities and letting them know we wanted to help the evacuees," Calamusa said. "There is an imperative to help those people — they've had to leave their belongings behind and they're staying in shelters in near-freezing weather."

Officials at Westport, Conn.-based Save the Children were still trying to decide Wednesday whether to dispatch staff to Fukushima, weighing information from the Japanese government and their member group, Save the Children Japan, said spokesman Lane Hartill. The group already has staff responding in Tokyo and the northern city of Sendai.

"This is a first for us. We are a humanitarian organization — we don't know this. We're not nuclear physicists. We want to be able to protect our staff and to help people and their children," Hartill said.

The Fukushima No. 1 (Daiichi) plant, which opened in 1971, had been a good neighbor in many ways, providing jobs and subsidizing kindergartens, parks and community centers to gain residents' acceptance. Increasingly, those same neighbors are feeling betrayed.

Naoki Nanno, 30, who spent two years as a construction worker on the plant's reactors, complained that Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, had been too slow in disclosing the problems that have mounted over the last few days. When one of the explosions occurred Monday, at the No. 3 reactor, Nanno was on the telephone with his brother.

"I heard a loud bang and I suspected it was an explosion at the nuclear plant, but they didn't announce it for another 20 minutes are so. There was radioactive material leaking after that explosion — we should have known about it right away," said Nanno, who lives 25 miles from the plant.

Takahiro Kori, 30, lost his house to the tsunami and barely escaped with his life: He could see the giant wave in his rear-view mirror as he sped away. After moving from shelter to shelter in Fukushima, each one with barely any food, he arrived Wednesday in Yamagata.

"I'm disgusted by the whole thing," Kori said.

"We were told our whole lives that the nuclear plant was safe," he said. "They told us even if there is a big earthquake or tsunami, it will never collapse. It all turned out to be lies."

For Japanese, the desperation has an added dimension: Already the name "Fukushima" is laden with something beyond the fear of damaged health.

The Japanese survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived the rest of their lives with the stigma of having been exposed to radiation, a stain that years never erased. Known as Hibakushas, they are formally recognized by the government if they lived within proximity of the blasts, and receive a special medical allowance.

But the designation also led to them being ostracized by other Japanese, who feared wrongly that the contamination was contagious or could be hereditary. The result was that many survivors of the bombings, and even their children, lived ghettoized lives because of their exposure to radiation.

The prospect of a similar stigma now worries some of those in and around the Fukushima plant.

"I am worried about the future, " said a 65-year-old retired engineer from Sugagawa City, 30 miles from the plant, who was interviewed by phone and didn't want his name used.

"There could be some rumors that the people from this area are contaminated by radiation, and that people should not get close to us."

Small amounts of radiation headed for California, but no health risk seen

Very low levels of radioactive isotopes from the damaged Japanese nuclear plant are expected to reach California as soon as Friday, but experts say the amount will be well within safe limits. A network of radiation monitors is keeping close watch.

Small amounts of radioactive isotopes from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant are being blown toward North America high in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean and will reach California as soon as Friday, according to experts.

A network of sensors in the U.S. and around the world is watching for the first signs of that fallout, though experts said they were confident that the amount of radiation would be well within safe limits.

Operated by the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. network known as Radnet is a system of 100 radiation monitors that work 24 hours a day, spread across the country in places such as Anaheim, Bakersfield and Eureka. In addition, a network of 63 sensors is operated by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an international agency allied with the United Nations. Atmospheric experts said the material should begin showing up on the West Coast as early as Friday, though it could take up to an additional week for the 5,000-mile trip from Japan to Southern California. Although the organization has told its member countries that the first indication of radiation would hit on Friday, the plume from a North Korean nuclear test in 2006 took about two weeks to travel to North America, U.N. officials said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the U.S. nuclear industry, said Wednesday that it did not expect dangerous levels of radioactivity to hit the West Coast, Hawaii, Alaska or U.S. territories in the Pacific. But whatever levels reach the U.S. initially are likely to increase in subsequent days, because radioactive emissions from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have grown since the disaster began Friday. The NRC sharply raised its warning to American citizens in Japan, urging them to evacuate an area within 50 miles of the Fukushima complex. Japanese authorities have ordered an evacuation within about 12 miles of the plant.

The NRC released computerized projections showing that within half a mile of the plant, radiation levels were so high that one could receive a fatal dose, and that even 50 miles away one could receive more than 16 times the average annual dose all people are exposed to from natural sources.

Those numbers were sharply higher than ones the NRC released days earlier. But although the Fukushima reactors are leaking more radiation now, experts continued to say that the particles would wash out of the atmosphere before they could reach the U.S.

So far, Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the Fukushima facility, and the Japanese government have not released any measurements or estimates of the total amount of radioactivity released by the accident. These numbers would be crucial to better project whether the material could affect other Asian nations, the Pacific islands or even the U.S.

Edwin Lyman, a specialist at the nuclear watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, said that although it was true that the more radioactivity released in Japan the more could migrate away from the region, he did not think the U.S. was at serious risk.

"We can never say never," Lyman said. "My judgment is that there will probably be measurable radiation, but except for a few hot spots it is not something we should really worry about."

Lyman said that the NRC's warning Wednesday to Americans in Japan to evacuate 50 miles from the Fukushima reactors was a long-overdue admission that the agency's prior warnings of a 10-mile exclusion zone from U.S. reactors during an emergency was inadequate.

Key federal officials involved in the Radnet monitoring program have so far not disclosed their predictions for U.S. radioactive exposure. The projections are being developed by the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center operated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. The center, part of the Energy Department, uses sophisticated models on supercomputers to project the movement of radioactive particles and other toxic substances through the atmosphere.

However, a computer model of atmospheric movements developed by the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy shows that the Fukushima plumes could travel across the Pacific, though the levels of radioactivity that could reach the West Coast of the U.S. remain unclear.

It appears that all of the models, however, are not based on measurements of radioactivity at the source and a projection of actual radioactive fallout in the U.S., but rather project a relative scale of radioactivity. Since Japanese authorities have said little about the amount of the releases at Fukushima, nobody can say how much radioactivity will hit California.

The models show that even with prevailing easterly winds, the plumes whip back and forth over a wide area of Japan's east coast, Russia's Kamchatka peninsula and Alaska's Aleutian Islands. It is unknown whether nuclear fallout is hitting the vast wilderness of northeastern Asia.

Of particular concern, however, is radiation emanating from Fukushima's No. 3 reactor. That reactor uses plutonium fuel, which poses a special health risk even in small quantities if the fallout were to reach U.S. shores.

A leading radiological health expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that the CDC was still confident that there would be no serious health consequences here. But CDC officials are watching the situation carefully.

"We have a saying: 'Modeling is OK, but measurement is everything,'" he said.

The Environmental Protection Agency said that it was watching the situation closely, but that its Radnet system had not yet detected radioactivity. It has added seven additional portable radiation monitors: two in Guam, three in Alaska and two in Hawaii.

U.S. Sounds Alarm on Radiation(Video)

TOKYO—Fear about radiation dangers posed by Japan's nuclear crisis spiked as the U.S. instructed its troops and citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the crippled reactors—establishing a "no-go" zone far wider than the buffer recommended by the Japanese government itself. And in a vivid sign that Japan's leadership is trying to move decisively to take control of the deepening crisis, the nation's military force dispatched two helicopters Thursday morning local time to dump water over the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power complex in hopes of taming its dangerously overheating nuclear facilities. The effort targeted a pool of spent nuclear fuel at reactor No. 3. Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said the water would help cool the spent fuel, lessening the risk of a catastrophic fire, if the water hit its target.

Mr. Kitazawa also said 11 water-cannon trucks were to be deployed at the plant Thursday afternoon in a further effort to cool the overheating waste.

Japan's nuclear regulator also announced that it was working to connect outside power cables to two of the units at the stricken plant, in hopes of restarting their cooling pumps. They hoped to have the cables available by Thursday afternoon.

Restarting the pumps would mark a major advance in the effort to prevent the nuclear disaster from worsening.

Japan's widening government involvement came as international skepticism built up. Late Wednesday, the U.S. State Department authorized the voluntary evacuation of dependents of U.S.-government personnel based in northeast Japan. The State Department also added that U.S. citizens in Japan consider departing, and reiterated its caution that citizens defer travel to the country at this time.

Earlier in the day, the top U.S. nuclear regulator, Gregory Jaczko, called radiation levels at one of the plant's units "extremely high," adding that, "for a comparable situation in the United States we would recommend an evacuation for a much larger radius than is currently being provided in Japan."

Previously the U.S. had agreed with Japanese officials that a 12-mile evacuation zone was adequate. The change came after the NRC ran computer-modeling exercises using "the best available information we have" about the damaged reactors along with accumulated knowledge about how systems inside nuclear plants perform under "severe accident conditions," a spokesman with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Asked why the U.S. set a broader "no-go" zone than did Japan, government spokesmen Yukio Edano said in a press conference that it was understandable to make a more "conservative decision" when trying to ensure the safety of citizens abroad, in a country where it doesn't exert direct control. He reiterated that Japan's government feels it is taking appropriate measures.

Also on Wednesday, the U.K. government advised its citizens in the city of Tokyo, a full 150 miles from the nuclear site, to "consider leaving the area" due to increasing infrastructure problems. The European Union's energy chief, Guenther Oettinger, also declared the Fukushima Daiichi site "effectively out of control." A spokeswoman for Mr. Oettinger later said the commissioner's remarks reflected his own personal views, and weren't based on privileged information.

Stock markets staged large swings, reflecting the depth of anxiety world-wide. "Every investment decision is made through the prism of what is going on in Japan," said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 2% lower at 11613. Thursday morning, Tokyo shares slid 2.1%.

Late Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it was deploying additional radiation monitors out of "an abundance of caution." The EPA already monitors the air for radiation via a national network of approximately 140 stationary and mobile devices. The agency said it sent additional monitors to Alaska and plans to send some to Hawaii.

Officials with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department say they don't expect harmful radiation levels to reach the U.S.

As part of the government effort to take on a larger role in the crisis management, on Wednesday plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, said 20 government officials had moved into the company's offices as part of a joint crisis headquarters.

The government's use of helicopters to dump water on the site was ordered by Economics Minister Banri Kaieda. "The minister considered the situation to be dangerous and judged there was an imminent necessity to issue the order," said a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which is part of Mr. Kaieda's purview. "After learning that Tepco was not injecting cooling water, he judged it to be very dangerous."

Two helicopters made two trips each, scooping up tons of seawater in a massive bucket and then trying to dump it into a pool used to store waste-fuel at reactor No. 3. An earlier explosion had blown the roof off of the building, exposing the storage pool and making the helicopter mission possible.

Because of radiation risk, the helicopters had to maintain considerable altitude. A government official said it wasn't yet clear whether the water hit its target.

The race to build an emergency power supply for the crippled plant, combined with details from the early moments of the crisis, highlight new questions about the design and safety record of the facility, which is Japan's oldest.

Common to all nuclear plants is this fundamental design problem: Engineers try to make the equipment impervious to one threat, but that may make it vulnerable to another.

In this case, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex's back-up diesel-powered generators were built below ground level. This bunker-like positioning would protect the generators from an air strike, cyclone or typhoon—but made them more vulnerable to an earthquake-driven tsunami.

When last week's giant waves struck, they immobilized the generators despite being designed to protect against water. The tsunami also apparently washed away the generators' fuel tanks, which were above ground.

"The earthquake and tsunami we had last week both exceeded our engineering assumptions by a long shot," said Tetsuo Ito, head of Kinki University's Atomic Energy Research Institute, near Osaka. "The nuclear industry around the world probably will have to review how we set those assumptions in designing a nuclear power plant."

Another area of scrutiny is the proximity of the plant's six reactors to one another. Damage to one reactor contributed to damage to another, and their proximity hindered a recovery.

This arrangement can be found at other plants, because it can make it easier to move equipment around and helps to keep a smaller work force, said Mr. Ito. But now it looks like a "bad idea," he said. "We need to strike a better balance of operational efficiency and safety."

Terry Pickens, director of nuclear regulatory policy at Xcel Energy Inc. of the U.S., said there is no cookie-cutter reactor of the vintage of the Fukushima units because utilities in those days hired their own engineering firms and architects, and customized the plants' designs. At Xcel's Monticello plant in Minnesota, diesel generators are kept as far apart as possible so that "a natural phenomenon isn't likely to take both of them out," Mr. Pickens said.

The Japanese plant lost power during Friday's earthquake. The three active reactors shut off automatically as designed, but a lack of electricity left workers unable to operate their cooling systems, leading to overheating. Tepco says the tsunami paralyzed all but one backup generator.

In a weekend briefing, Tepco Managing Director Akio Komori cited the elevation of the backup generators as one potential issue. A Tepco spokesman confirmed the remarks, adding that a full probe will have to wait while workers try to bring the reactors under control.

A spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the nation's nuclear-power regulator, said Fukushima Daiichi's emergency-generator design is "fairly prevalent" at other Japanese plants. The spokesman, Shigekatsu Ohmukai, disputed that the elevation of the generators was a problem. The agency, he said, had concluded that the plant could withstand a certain size of tsunami but "obviously the tsunami caused by Friday's earthquake exceeded our assumptions. That's the problem."

Tepco tested the Fukushima Daiichi plant to withstand an earthquake magnitude of 7.9—a level of seismic activity the power company thought wouldn't be surpassed in the area, according to company documents on its website from 2010. The quake that struck Friday, however, was about 10 times as big as that theoretical maximum.

In the U.S., where there are 23 similar reactors operated by 11 different companies, backup generators typically are housed in bunker-like buildings at ground level. They are designed with watertight fittings that are intended to keep out water from floods or hurricanes.

General Electric Co. designed three of the six reactors for Tepco at the Daiichi complex but it didn't determine the layout of every piece of equipment, a company spokesman said. Some of that was done by architects and engineers hired by Tepco. He added that the main problem was the larger-then-expected tsunami, not the generator placement.

The Daiichi plant was central to a falsified-records scandal a decade ago that led Tepco to briefly shut down all its plants and led to the departure of a number of senior executives. Nuclear experts say that led to a number of disclosures of previously unreported problems at the plant.