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Thousands of people are evacuated as plant workers try to prevent meltdowns.
Smoke billows from burning vehicles near a nuclear power complex in Tokaimura, Japan, Saturday morning.
AP PHOTO
TOKYO — Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday’s powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns.
Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s Unit 1 scrambled ferociously to tamp down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9 magnitude quake and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system.
About 3,000 people within two miles of the plant were urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 6.2 miles after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1’s control room.
The government declared a state of emergency at the Daiichi unit — the first at a nuclear plant in Japan’s history. But hours later, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the six-reactor Daiichi site in northeastern Japan, announced that it had lost cooling ability at a second reactor there and three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site.
The government quickly declared states of emergency for those units, too. Nearly 14,000 people living near the two power plants were ordered to evacuate.
Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the situation was most dire at Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit 1, where pressure had risen to twice what is consider the normal level. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kept cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by tsunami flooding.
Officials at the Daiichi facility began venting radioactive vapors from the unit to relieve pressure inside the reactor case. The loss of electricity had delayed that effort for several hours.
Plant workers there labored to cool down the reactor core, but there was no prospect for immediate success. They were temporarily cooling the reactor with a secondary system, but it wasn’t working as well as the primary one, according to Yuji Kakizaki, an official at the Japanese nuclear safety agency.
Even once a reactor is shut down, radioactive byproducts give off heat that can ultimately produce volatile hydrogen gas, melt radioactive fuel, or even breach the containment building in a full meltdown belching radioactivity into the surroundings, according to technical and government authorities.
Despite plans for the intentional release of radioactivity, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the 40-year-old plant was not leaking radiation.
“With evacuation in place and the ocean-bound wind, we can ensure the safety,” Edano said at a televised news conference early Saturday.
It was unclear if the elevation of radioactivity around the reactor was known at the time he spoke.
The outside measurement of radiation at Daiichi was far below the allowed limit for a year, other officials said, reporting that it would take 70 days standing at the gate to reach the yearly limit.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician who runs a disaster preparedness institute at Columbia University, said the reported level of radiation outside the plant would not pose an immediate danger, though it could lift the rate of thyroid cancer in a population over time.
However, he called the reported level inside the plant extraordinarily high, raising a concern about acute health effects. “I would personally absolutely not want to be inside,” he said.
While the condition of the reactor cores was of utmost concern, Tokyo Electric Power Co. also warned of power shortages and an “extremely challenging situation in power supply for a while.”
The Daiichi site is located in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo. The 460-megawatt Unit 1 began operating in 1971 and is the oldest at the site.