SENDAI – A new explosion at a stricken nuclear power plant hit Japan on Monday as it raced to avert a reactor meltdown after a quake-tsunami disaster that is feared to have killed more than 10,000 people. Searchers found 2,000 bodies just in the northeastern region of Miyagi, while millions were left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food. Hundreds of thousands more were homeless after the tsunami drowned whole towns. Panic selling saw stocks close more than six percent lower on the Tokyo bourse on fears for the world’s third-biggest economy, as power shortages prompted rolling blackouts and factory shutdowns in quake-hit areas. The police chief in Miyagi prefecture, which includes Sendai and took the full force of the massive tsunami following the biggest quake ever to hit Japan, said the death toll was certain to exceed 10,000 in his region alone.
At least 1.4 million people in Japan were temporarily without running water and more than 500,000 were taking shelter in evacuation centres, said the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. But it was the fear of a nuclear disaster looming on top of the quake and tsunami that gripped the embattled nation as it struggled with a crisis described by Prime Minister Naoto Kan as the worst since World War II. Explosions have rocked two overheating reactors at the ageing Fukushima plant, located 250 kilometres (160 miles) northeast of Tokyo, after the cooling systems were knocked out by Friday’s 8.9-magnitude quake. A first explosion blew apart the building surrounding the plant’s number-one reactor on Saturday but the seal around the reactor itself remained intact, officials said.
On Monday, shortly after Kan said the plant was still in an “alarming” state, a blast at its number-three reactor shook the facility, injuring 11 people and sending plumes of smoke billowing into the sky. The Japanese government formally asked the US for help in cooling the nuclear reactors damaged by a major earthquake last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday.
