cryptogon.com

Radiation levels in Tokyo, one of the world’s most populous cities, rose 10 times above average Tuesday evening, spreading fear among many of the 33 million residents in the metropolitan area.

The best advice experts could give them was to stay indoors, close the windows and avoid breathing bad air — steps very similar to those for handling a smog alert or avoiding influenza.

While these steps may sound inconsequential, experts said the danger in Tokyo, while worrisome, is slight – at least for now.

“Everything I’ve seen so far suggests there have been nominal amounts of material released. Therefore, the risks are generally low to the population,” Jerrold Bushberg, who directs programs in health physics at the University of California at Davis, said in a telephone interview.

“There may be more significant risks for emergency workers on site. They are dealing with the occupational exposure, but not for the population at large.”

Fresh explosions Tuesday at the Fukushima plant, 180 miles north of Tokyo, released low levels of radiation, escalating a crisis triggered by last week’s massive earthquake and tsunami. With cooling systems knocked out, the fear is more blasts within the reactors at the complex could eventually cause a major radiation leak.

The levels measured around Tokyo at one point were 40 times above normal but have receded to 10 times. That amounts to roughly the same dose as a chest or abdominal CT scan.

“My instinct tells me it is probably not a health concern for the long term,” said Dr. John Chute, a cancer biology expert at Duke University School of Medical Center. But because radiation is so poorly understood, Chute said taking steps to prevent exposure just makes sense.

I don’t know the law in Japan, so I can’t tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

The first rolling power cuts in the history of the giant Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) have already closed many plants, with Toyota shutting down until at least Wednesday.

Rolling three-hour blackouts have wrecked the clockwork precision of Japan’s railways while a thousand schools across Tokyo cancelled classes. Even Tokyo’s ubiquitous neon signs have gone dark, a big blow to confidence in a country that lives by routine and order.

With a new explosion at a nuclear plant in Fukushima threatening a far more serious radiation leak, the power shortage will not get better anytime soon.

“It looks like Japan could be in a “power down” state for a protracted period,” said Stephen Roberts, Nomura’s chief economist for Australia. “That’s what makes it different from other major quakes.”

“People tend to compare it to Kobe and assume a “v”-shaped recovery, but Kobe never caused this level of power disruption,” he added. “It means any proper recovery could be delayed right out to the fourth quarter.”

…

There is certainly still plenty of unused manufacturing capacity in Japan, but far less when it comes to power supply.

Analysts at Australian investment bank Macquarie estimated the earthquake and resulting tsunami took a quarter of TEPCO’s total capacity of 65 gigawatts, shared between nuclear and oil.

In all some 15 nuclear plants were shut down, and it was not clear how many would re-start or when.

“We think power supply shortages and rations are likely to continue in TEPCO’s supply area for months rather than weeks,” the analysts wrote in a note to clients.

And the growing crisis at the Fukushima plant brings into question Japan’s whole experiment with nuclear power, which provides about one-third of total generating capacity.

…

Nomura’s Stephens said there was perhaps scope to ramp up power output at some of Japan’s oil and coal plants, though at great extra cost. Japan’s increased demand for coal, oil and LNG for generation would also add to upward pressure on resource prices and so to inflation risks elsewhere in Asia.

But even then it was unlikely to be enough to make up the current shortfall in power.

The country will keep its seven oldest nuclear reactors offline as part of a nationwide safety review to run through June, Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin today. Two of the seven are currently offline, while the remainder totals 5.2 gigawatts of the 20.7 gigawatts installed over Germany’s 17 reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said that the fire at the reactor this morning had been caused by a hydrogen explosion inside the reactor – which had left two holes in its walls, measuring a combined total of eight square metres in size.

Those holes, TEPCO has now confirmed, have left the pool of nuclear fuel – which has been evaporating away, as a cooling failure meant sufficient cooling water could not be supplied – now exposed to the open air, with rods therefore exposed to the atmosphere outside.

TEPCO did not indicate, however, how much radiation the ‘spent’ (used) material was liable to emit.

The worrying admission came after Tepco had confirmed the level of radiation being emitted from the pool was too high to allow staff go about their normal work in the reactor’s control room.

The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises.

Experts now fear that the pool containing those rods from the fourth reactor has run dry, allowing the rods to overheat and catch fire. That could spread radioactive materials far and wide in dangerous clouds.

The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the three have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.

If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools did indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.

“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”

A spokesman for the Japanese company that runs the stricken reactors said in an interview on Monday that the spent fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants had been left uncooled since shortly after the quake.

Dozens of Japanese firms from component makers to electronics firms and automakers are keeping their plants shuttered, while damage to infrastructure including power, roads, rails and ports will take months to repair.

The yen tripped on talk of intervention and bond yields rose as investors sold debt to offset losses in the stock market. The scale and speed of the equity selloff, on record volume for a second day running, forced fund managers to sit on the sidelines.

“Even if we wanted to sell today there was very little we could do,” said a fund manager at a Japanese fund, asking not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

“We didn’t sell and waited sidelined because hedge funds were just dumping stocks in panic.”

At one point the broader Nikkei plunged 14 percent after Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the risk of nuclear contamination was rising at the Fukushima Daiichi complex on Japan’s ravaged northeastern coast, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.