Japan took a group of journalists inside its crippled nuclear plant for the first time on Saturday, stepping up efforts to prove to the world it is on top of the disaster. More than 30 members of the press, wearing protective masks and anti-radiation suits and confined to buses, saw the devastated buildings housing the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, the scene of the planet’s worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl a quarter century earlier. One journalist reported how four reactor buildings were in varying states of destruction, with the one around reactor number 3 largely collapsed. He said the bases of the buildings, which stood on ground just 10 metres (30 feet) above sea level, were filled with crumpled trucks, twisted metal fences and large buckled water tanks. Other buildings in the compound also showed signs of the destruction wrought by the 14-metre-high tsunami. Crows and dragonflies could be seen around the reactors, in an area the reporter’s dosimeter recorded radiation at 50 microsieverts per hour. Nearer to the reactors the reading rose to 300 microsieverts (0.3 millisieverts), the highest of the trip. The Japanese government-set threshold for evacuation from a normal area is accumulated radiation of 20 millisieverts per year. The tour, in which just four representatives from foreign media were allowed to participate, is part of efforts by TEPCO to show they are close to solving the problem.
