MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

Open to the elements after its walls were blown away, this is the dried-up storage pool where overheating fuel rods are threatening a nuclear meltdown at Japan’s stricken Fukushima power plant.

“Close-up pictures of the devastated No 4 reactor building show the gaping hole through which radiation is escaping into the atmosphere as the rods break down.

Last night, the UN’s nuclear safety body said it was “too early to say” whether desperate attempts to cool them by spraying water into the building had been a success.

The Foreign Office issued an urgent statement advising any Britons within 50 miles of the plant to leave the area immediately, and arranged charter flights to get British citizens out of the country.

Radiation levels 20 miles from the plant – well outside Japan’s official 12-mile evacuation zone – came close to double the safety limit normally allowed for nuclear workers.

Despite assurances that other countries were not at risk of harmful levels of radiation, growing alarm led to panic-buying of radiation-blocking drugs in places thousands of miles from Japan.”  Read more.

Key details:

• Water dropped by helicopters seems to blow away in wind
• At least 19 workers hurt, 20 exposed to radiation
• Four of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant’s six reactors have faced serious crises
• U.S. says Americans should consider leaving Japan
• Aid workers, victims, regional officials appeal for help
• More than 5,300 officially listed as dead, but toll expected to top 10,000

Japan tried high-pressure water cannons, fire trucks and even helicopters that dropped batches of seawater in increasingly frantic attempts Thursday to cool an overheated nuclear complex as U.S. officials warned the situation was deteriorating.

Two Japanese military CH-47 Chinook helicopters began dumping seawater on the complex’s damaged Unit 3 at 9:48 a.m. (8:48 p.m. EDT), defense ministry spokeswoman Kazumi Toyama said. The choppers dumped at least four loads on the reactor in just the first 10 minutes, though television footage showed much of it appearing to disperse in the wind.  Read more.

I’m still skeptical that the lower continental states are at risk, but this has been reported as a possibility immediately following the quake and tsunami …

All 50 emergency workers who had been fighting to keep overheating reactors cool were this morning pulled back 500 yards from the complex as radiation levels became too dangerous.

And in an extraordinary attack, the French government accused the Japanese of losing control of the situation and hiding the full scale of the disaster.

“FUKUSHIMA, Japan – Japan suspended operations to keep its stricken nuclear plant from melting down Wednesday after surging radiation made it too dangerous to stay.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the workers dousing the reactors in a frantic effort to cool them needed to withdraw.

‘The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now,’ Edano said. ‘Because of the radiation risk we are on standby,’ he said.

The nuclear crisis has triggered international alarm and partly overshadowed the human tragedy caused by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, which pulverized Japan’s northeastern coastline, killing an estimated 10,000 people and severely damaging the nuclear plant.

Since then authorities have tried frantically to avert an environmental catastrophe at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex in northeastern Japan, 170 miles (270 kilometers) north Tokyo.

Edano said the government expects to ask the U.S. military for help. He did not elaborate. He said the government is still considering whether and how to take up the various offers of help from other countries.”  Read more.

“(CNN) — The explosion Tuesday at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has elevated the situation there to a ‘serious accident’ on a level just below Chernobyl, a French nuclear official said, referring to an international scale that rates the severity of such incidents.

The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale — or INES — goes from Level 1, which indicates very little danger to the general population, to Level 7, a ‘major accident’ in which there’s been a large release of radioactive material and there will be widespread health and environmental effects.

‘It’s clear we are at Level 6, that’s to say we’re at a level in between what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,’ Andre-Claude Lacoste, president of France’s nuclear safety authority, told reporters Tuesday.”  Read more.