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A POWERFUL 6.9-magnitude earthquake hit northeast Japan on Tuesday, sparking panic and triggering a tsunami including a one-metre (three-foot) wave that crashed ashore at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant.
National broadcaster NHK urged residents to “flee immediately” to higher ground, reminding viewers to heed the lessons of the “Great East Japan Earthquake”.
A massive undersea quake with a magnitude of 9.0 that struck in March 2011 unleashed a tsunami that left more than 18,500 people dead or missing.
It sent three reactors into meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
An official from plant operator TEPCO told a news conference that a one-metre wave had hit the coast at the facility, but a company spokesman told AFP there were no reports of damage.
About a dozen other waves were recorded elsewhere on the northeast coast, according to the Meterological Agency, but they were smaller than initial warnings of waves as high as 3.0 metres.
The biggest, measuring 1.4 metres, hit the port at Sendai north of Fukushima, but officials said there were no reports of damage there.
NHK aired rolling coverage of the earthquake, with the words “Tsunami! Flee!” in white lettering over a bright red band on the screen.
The Meterological Agency lifted its final tsunami warning nearly seven hours after the earthquake struck.
TEPCO earlier reported that a water cooling system at a reactor in the separate Fukushima Daini facility had briefly stopped, in an automatic response, but that it was back up and operating.
“The biggest risk now is a case whereby contaminated water is carried away with the tsunami, which pollutes the environment,” TEPCO’s chief decommissioning officer Naohiro Masuda told reporters, of the situation at Fukushima Daiichi.
The 2011 disaster sent radiation levels across the Pacific Ocean soaring and decimated some fishing grounds off Japan’s coast.
The global Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research said in July that levels were returning to normal but that the seabed and harbour near Fukushima were still highly contaminated.
Residents along the coast heeding evacuation advice clogged some roads, with a Fukushima newspaper reporting unusual early morning traffic jams in the small city of Soma.
There were no immediate signs of widespread damage and only minor injuries were initially reported.
Fourteen injuries have been reported throughout the region, including three elderly women who broke bones when falling or trying to evacuate.
Scared
Still, people along the coast were badly shaken.
“It was huge and lasted so long,” Akemi Anzai, from the city of Minamisoma north of the Fukushima plant, said of the quake.
“The tsunami siren warning can be heard from the coastline,” she told AFP. “The ground is still shaking. I’m so scared. But my concern is rather the situation at the nuclear plant.”
The United States Geological Survey said the 6.9 magnitude quake, at a shallow depth of 11.3 kilometres, struck shortly before 6am (9pm Monday Irish time) in the Pacific off Fukushima.
It shook buildings in Tokyo, 230 kilometres to the south.
Shinkansen bullet train services were suspended in the region but gradually resumed, though delays were still being reported.
Sendai airport, which suffered significant damage during the 2011 tsunami, temporarily closed but flights resumed in the morning.
Fishing boats had rushed out to sea to avoid the direct impact of the tsunami, the Sankei Shimbun said.
NHK showed footage of what appeared to be seawater flowing up a river in Miyagi prefecture though none of it surged beyond the banks.
“The fear that I felt almost six years ago came back,” Junko Murata, another Minamisoma resident, told AFP.
“Maybe there won’t be major damage this time but we will have to remain on edge for years and years,” she added, referring to the Fukushima plant.
Japan sits at the junction of four tectonic plates and suffers several relatively violent quakes every year, although high building standards and frequent drills limit the number of casualties.
In April two strong quakes hit Kumamoto prefecture, leaving at least 50 dead and causing widespread damage.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, a 4.3-magnitude earthquake hit a location southeast of Culverden at 7.24pm this morning Irish time. A separate, stronger quake hit in the early hours of this morning Irish time – 11am New Zealand time – with a magnitude of 6.1.
The quake hit New Zealand’s north island, off the coast of Palmerston North.
EarthquakesGA / TwitterMag 6.1 North Island, NZ. 22 Nov 2016 11:19 (AEDT). Lat/Long 40.76S 176.50E. Depth 55km. Info is preliminary.
— EarthquakesGA (@EarthquakesGA) November 22, 2016
- © AFP, 2016, with reporting from Darragh Peter Murphy.
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Nuclear power is the future they said…it’ll be great they said
The plant failed due to a problem in the diesel generators. This failure was in the desalination system. Fukushima was a failure of the regular tech supporting the plant, not the nuclear tech.
With a name like yours I suppose you’re into hydropower, yeah? :-)
Apart from Chernobyl, no nuclear workers or members of the public have ever died as a result of exposure to radiation due to a commercial nuclear reactor incident. Most of the serious radiological injuries and deaths that occur each year (2-4 deaths and many more exposures above regulatory limits) are the result of large uncontrolled radiation sources, such as abandoned medical or industrial equipment.
Not one person has died due to Fukushima. While some reports claim that for instance coal plants in the US kill around 24,000 a year http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/view/24 . Greenpeace put the figure on Chernobyl from 1990-2004 at 10,000-200,000 . If the 24,000 a year figure was right. That is 336,000 from coal in the same period. All these figures are very hard to measure. But the point is. Nuclear isn’t uniquely dangerous. As for the safety of Hydro. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Look up the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum.
Ever notice the way capitalists never want to fund nuclear power companies? Thats because they are hugely expensive, requiring massive amounts of money to build the plants, run them and then to shut them down, also the waste needs to be constantly suppervised. Thats why they are always state subsidised, it is the most expensive form of energy.
Nuclear powerplant construction is usually just a scam to get huge amounts of public money into private hands.
“More than 18,000 people died when the towering tsunami smashed into Japan’s northeast in March 2011 setting off the crisis at Fukushima.” That sounds misleading. 18,000 died due to the tsunami. Nobody has died due to Fukushima.
600 people died during the evacuation around Fukushima to avoid dying of radiation exposure.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/july/fukushima-health-impacts-071712.html
Which only goes to emphasis that the hysteria and panic that fear of nuclear power can cause is worse than any perceived threat from radiation.
For the record, given the population of the area, 130 extra cases of cancer in a year that the article suggests is completely and utterly statistically insignificant. Cancer rates in the general population is about 1 in 3. It’s like smoking 20 cigarettes a day and then blaming your lung cancer on that one time you stood near an open fire and might have inhaled some smoke.
18000 people did not die as a result of the flooding of Fukushima.
Time for a nuclear power plant to come online 10 years. Time for a wind farm to come online 18 months. The last Nuclear plant to become operational in the USA took 23 years to build. In order to maintain the current percentage nuclear power generation a new plant would have to come online every 6 weeks.
The Wall Street Journal has shown that the cost of nuclear power is typically 12-20cent per KWH, the average cost of renewables is 6cent per KWH.
The mining of uranium produces 250,000 tons of CO2 a year.
So knowing all this??? Why bother building nuclear powerplants? Why take the risk?
The problem is we really don’t have renewables that can scale correctly.
Wind is to unreliable to provide base load. Tidal is not developed yet, we have reached our capacity of hydro. Solar isn’t economical viable.
The answer is to build an reactor on an existing site in the UK or France and run an interconnector directly from it to Ireland
Poor Journalism once again, no facts of figures.
Dear Journal, let me write your next story
“There a house in Mayo that opened a window and Radon readiation leaked out, Mayo is also has a coast line that is connected via water to the gulf of Mexico where there was a giant Oil Spill”
Grammar and spell check? I don’t think you’d get the job lol.
‘Is also has a’ poor little keyboard warrior all embarrassed yet?
No Shaun,
I’m not embarrassed, but you should be, as Grammer Nazis are the biggest joke on the internet
Grammar never bothers me if its wrong, I know how iPhones and predictive text can be, but when your commenting on someone’s article calling its poor and giving the impression you could do better and then attempt it and end up fcuking it up, you deserve to be put in your place and treated the same way you treated the journalist.
the cost of “cheap” electricity eh… I don’t agree with nuclear power and they are sitting ducks for any fanatics who want to fly a plane into one for whatever reason!!!
What would happen if a plane did fly into one Mark?
lets see… what would happen if some nut job flew a plane into sellafield because they were pissed off at the uk’s foreign policy??? i think we would be just fine – no need for those iodine tablets they posted out some time back… i think we might have a few fish with two heads uncle mort – what do you think? it’s a pretty simple action / reaction type scenario!!!
@Mark, you don’t know what would happen do you? Greenpeace propaganda will never replace reality.
i suppose what is happening in Fukushima at the moment is propaganda… what happened in Chernobyl was propaganda… and what happened in Long Island was also propaganda… and these didn’t even need a terrorist attack… next you are going to tell me that 9/11 was green peace propaganda too!!! clever mort, well done.
@Mark, what happened at the places that you mentioned that would give me cause for alarm? How many died at Long Island for example? Chernobyl was due entirely to incompetance and some fool doing unsafe testing. The nuclear industry has a much better safety record than the renewables one.
my point exactly mort “the incompetence of some fool” flying a fully loaded jumbo jet into a nuclear power station… you can give a concrete guarantee that everything would be 100% safe? what about all the children from Chernobyl that come here with horrific cancers and other unspeakable conditions??? how do you cost the exclusion zones into your cheap power models??? is that per acre per year??? what about the storage costs of the spent fuel with a half life of 250,000 years??? have you got the costs for that too?? the pyramids aren’t in brilliant shape and they are less than 5000 years old!!! i think that heaping further potentially catastrophic environmental problems on future generations is selfish for a few cheap watts… will never agree with your point of view mort. too many holes in it – sorry you are wrong!!!
Mark, you name a few places but don’t elaborate as to what actually happened, the answer is not much.
You talk about contaminated lands which in the grand scale of things Isn’t to much compared to the millions of people put displaced and killed of fights over oil and gas.
okay brian, google the aforementioned 3 places and enlighten yourself a bit… that is not my perogative really!
i disagree with war for oil and having millions of acres of contaminated radiated land so I’m not certain what your point here is either???
The planning process for nuclear process is dogged by green objections. If renewable power is so cheap then why are our bills so high? Germany and Denmark have both found that renewables don’t work. The Chinese and others can build nuclear power stations in a fraction of the time it takes elsewhere and are doing so.
We constantly read here of people slagging off cheap nuclear power and not one explanation of how paying through the nose for electricity is of benefit to anyone.
The costs of remediating nuclear power sites is a fraction of the green claims as most of the ‘waste’ is low level items such as work clothing and this waste can and is being cleaned bilogically. Now that the need for plutonium for weapons has passed [except for in Iran] the whole process of power from nuclear reactors is a lot cleaner and Thorium reactors will consume any unwanted fuel from uranium based units.
Greens don’t like cheap power and cheap travel and all the other things that most people like.
“greens don’t like cheap power and cheap travel and all the other things that most people like”
unbelievable b*llsh*t!!! rest my case here i think!!!
Ah so you accept that it is more expensive than renewable energies but you say that that is all down to green objections. That doesn’t really sound true, funny because I remember Citybank saying that the risks (financial) in developing new plants were so great that they could bring a company to its knees; this coming from a bank that is quite willing to take huge risks.
Nuclear plants are just as expensive in China – were they have no green objections to the plants – as they are in the UK were I assume they do have green objectors.
Given that they are so expensive and unwieldy the only reasons for building them are part military and part money pit. It’s a fantasy that they produce cheap energy, they don’t.
Nuclear is expensive to build due to delays and other costs incurred by green interference and is the cheapest reliable source of coanstant electricity.
Nuclear power costs 3c kWh to produce so why pay 27c kWh for land based wind if and when the wind blows.
I did not say “Ah so you accept that it is more expensive than renewable energies ” anything like that , Kindly do not misrepresent what I write.
Nuclear is expensive to build due to the complexities of the plants, the amount labour required, the casting of huge parts in single pieces (the most expensive part) the same companies that do the castings also provide castings for the petro-chemical industries too (there are only 2 companies in the world that do these castings), the rising cost of commodity prices, the high tolerances for parts, the high skill needed to produce those parts (the commodities and skills are also needed to build other types of plants). These are the reasons for the high cost of plants, “green objections” don’t factor at all in the cost of plants, also these are the reasons that the nuclear site for the high cost of plants too.
“that the nuclear site for the high cost of the plants too.”
“that shd read nuclear industry site for the high cost”
Some many hysterical comments about nucler power and not one shread of evidence to support the hysteria.
The safety system worked at Three Mile Island in the USA and there were no deaths and the locals were not affected.
The Chernobyl reactor would not and not have been licensed in the West.
Fukushima ???About 360 litres (95 gallons) of tainted water leaked from a desalination unit although it did not escape from the complex, Your oil tank holds more than that.
Remember that greens want to impose a renewable power system on us that only works in fits and starts and costs a fortune. See your electricity bill for details.
Nuclear power produces only 0.1% (one tenth of one percent) of all the UK’s hazardous waste production and in over 60 years has not been a problem to store.
There cannot be a nuclear explosion at a power station and the US government has shown that the newer reactors will only suffer very minor damage should a jihadi fly a plane into one and that the core would remain intact.
Nuclear is expensive to build due to the complexities of the plants, the amount labour required, the casting of huge parts in single pieces (the most expensive part) the same companies that do the castings also provide castings for the petro-chemical industries too (there are only 2 companies in the world that do these castings), the rising cost of commodity prices, the high tolerances for parts, the high skill needed to produce those parts (the commodities and skills are also needed to build other types of plants). These are the reasons for the high cost of plants, “green objections” don’t factor at all in the cost of plants, also these are the reasons that the nuclear site for the high cost of plants too.
The cost of building a nuclear power station in China is $2000/kW. It is almost $7000 in the USA. This cost rockets when delays of up to 20 years and more due to green pressure groups are factored in. China does not pay any attention to whingers and moaners.
The Nuclear Industry does of course require highly skilled personel which excludes hippies and other deadbeats from the industry.
have your say