TOKYO – Japan restored power to a crippled nuclear reactor on Sunday in its race to avert disaster at a plant wrecked by an earthquake and tsunami that are estimated to have killed more than 15,000 people in one prefecture alone.
Three hundred engineers have been struggling inside the danger zone to salvage the six-reactor Fukushima plant in the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years ago. In one remarkable story of survival, an 80-year-old woman and 16-year-old youth were found alive under the rubble in the devastated city of Ishinomaki, nine days after the killer earthquake and tsunami, NHK public TV said, quoting police.
Officials at plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said the workers aimed to restore the control room function, lights and the cooling at the No 1 reactor, which is connected to the No.2 reactor by cable. But rising cases of contaminated vegetables, dust and water have raised new fears and the government said it will decide by Monday on whether to restrict consumption and shipments of food from the quake zone.
Tokyo, just 240 km (150 miles) south of the crippled plant and where the government said it had found traces of radioactive iodine, was subdued on Sunday but there was no sense of panic. Police said they believed more than 15,000 people had been killed in Miyagi prefecture. The unprecedented crisis will cost the world’s third largest economy up to quarter of a trillion dollars and require Japan’s biggest reconstruction push since post-World War Two.
