Battle to cool Japan plant as food jitters grow

FE Team | Published: March 23, 2011 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

KITAKAMI (Japan), Mar 22 (AFP): Engineers toiled to restart cooling systems at a stricken nuclear plant in Japan Tuesday after a new smoke scare, as the detection of radioactivity in the sea fuelled anxiety over food safety. An external electricity supply has now been restored to all six reactors, 11 days after a 14-metre (46-foot) tsunami crippled the ageing facility, but more work is needed before the power can be turned back on. The twin quake and tsunami disaster, Japan's worst crisis since World War II, has left more than 22,000 people dead or missing, with entire communities along the northeast coast swept away. Now the shell-shocked nation faces an invisible threat from radiation seeping from the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which lies just 250 kilometres (155 miles) from the greater Tokyo area and its 30 million inhabitants. The health ministry advised residents in five towns or cities in Fukushima prefecture not to use tap water to make formula milk and other drinks for babies due to abnormally high radiation levels. Authorities have already halted shipments of some foodstuffs in four nearby prefectures after the discovery of higher than normal levels of radiation in produce such as milk and vegetables. The government also ordered increased inspections of seafood after radioactive elements were detected in the Pacific Ocean near the Fukushima plant. At one spot radioactive iodine 80 times the normal level was found. But with many fishing villages on Japan's northeast coast flattened, boats destroyed and ports damaged, the local seafood industry has in any case largely ground to a halt. The Japanese head of the UN atomic watchdog, Yukiya Amano, said he had "no doubt" the nuclear crisis would be "effectively overcome" -- while cautioning that the situation remained serious. France's Nuclear Safety Authority, however, warned that local contamination from the plant would last "for decades and decades". The plant has been hit by a series of blasts since the March 11 tsunami, and radiation levels around the facility have hit danger level, in the worst nuclear crisis since the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986.