UPDATE: Technicians are battling to cool the reactor following a blast at the building housing reactor 1 on Saturday. A second explosion would still be unlikely to breach the nuclear reactor itself – BBC.
3 people have been “affected” by radiation from Tokyo Electric Power’s power plant, Nikkei has reported.
However, Kyodo News cited Fukushima Prefecture as saying that because the radiation was detected on their clothes, there was no immediate need to decontaminate the three people who were evacuated from within a three mile radius around the plant.
Power company confirms four people injured at plant.
Core is now being cooled. NHK News reporting that several employees at the Fukushima plant have been injured at the plant, no details yet or whether any incident is directly related to any meltdown. An explosion has been heard. NB This is not and could never be a nuclear explosion. Two radioactive substances, cesium and radioactive iodine, have been detected near the Number One reactor at the Fukushima plant. But, that’s not leakage, rather from safety venting.
As far away as 60 kilometers there is evacuation activity, although 10 km (no longer 3 km) was marked as the safety radius from the plant. At times of such disasters there is a lot of misinformation around, says Japanese diplomat. Safety radius was simply a precautionary measure.
The world media is repeatedly alerting us to the possibility of “nuclear meltdown” at a power plant in Japan. Nuclear meltdown is not a term recognised by the International Atomic Energy Agency nor by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission although the phenomenon does colloquially refer to the melting of the radioactive core of a nuclear power plant when cooling systems fail. The industry and regulators do use the phrase – Core Melt Accident.
Although everyone is concerned by the possibility of a nuclear leak, it should be noted that although there have been two meltdowns at American civil nuclear power plants in history (the Fermi 1 experimental fast breeder reactor and Three Mile Island accident). Both incidents were dramatic but neither led to any deaths nor serious injuries. Indeed, there have been no deaths or serious injuries reportedly from radiation leaked from a Western civil nuclear power plant.