MAKES now almost 25 years of accident a nuclear plant in Ukraine that marked a before and after. It killed 31 people and over 135,000 were evacuated. Now there is a similar situation at the plant in Fukushima, whose surroundings have been evacuated 50,000 people within a radius of 20 miles. In this power plant about 250 kilometers northeast of Tokyo was a huge explosion yesterday, after an increase in the level of radioactivity produced by the earthquake of 8.9 magnitude on the Richter scale, happened on Friday, which left four workers injured.
The containment building which housed a steel tank reactor collapsed because of the explosion, which left a huge plume of smoke visible for tens of miles over several hours. At first sent out an alarm, and the uncertainty and fear that had exploded the nuclear reactor itself, but after the first inspections, the government said the explosion had occurred outside.
The Agency Nuclear and Industrial Safety in Japan was quick to assess the accident at level 4 on a scale that goes to the 7, making it the third worst accident of this scale, only after Category 7 explosion at Chernobyl and Category 5 by the meltdown at Three Mile Island in America. Now, the solution posed by Japan's government to cool the core structure is filled with sea water, a method has been used on any other occasion and does not offer any guarantees. The government spokesman Yukio Edan, he even explained that doses of iodine have to be divided among the Japanese, an element to prevent thyroid cancer, one of the most developed for radiation victims at Chernobyl. More than 50,000 soldiers have been mobilized to try to control the situation, besides the Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, who acknowledged that they had released "minimal amounts of radiation."
BALANCE Further north, a few miles from the coast where there was the epicenter of the earthquake, rescue teams work, particularly in the city of Sendai, which was devastated after being devastated by large tsunami waves. The Government officially part of about 1,800 fatalities. WHO spoke of 621 dead and 645 people missing. Furthermore, only in Miyagi province is still no trace of about 9,500 people. Nationwide gas services, electricity and phone does not work one hundred per cent, partly because on Friday there have been 240 aftershocks, 27 of which exceeded 6 degrees of magnitude.
As prescribed in Japan's security protocol, eleven nuclear power plants in areas hit by the quake automatically halted its activity, so the Government yesterday urged citizens to conserve energy. Japan suffered the worst nuclear accident in its history in 1999 when an explosion followed by a leak in a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura killed two workers and exposed to more than a hundred people to high levels of radiation .
SOURCE: NEWS GIPUZKOA.COM
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