Nuclear crisis ‘beyond belief’ admit experts

“We have experienced a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy head of the country’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

And another official with the agency admitted: “There is nothing else we can do but keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

Engineers are struggling to restore electricity to the stricken plant but getting the power flowing will not be the end of their battle. With its mangled machinery and partly melted reactor cores, bringing the complex under control is a monstrous job.

Restoring the power to all six units at the tsunami-damaged complex is key, because it will, in theory, power up the maze of motors, valves and switches that help deliver cooling water to the overheated reactor cores and the spent fuel pools that are leaking radiation.

Ideally, officials believe it should only take a day to get the complex under control once the cooling system is up and running. In reality, the effort to end the crisis is likely to take weeks.

Conditions at the plant remain volatile. Yesterday a plume of smoke rose from two reactor units prompting workers to evacuate.

In another setback, the plant’s operator said it had just discovered that some of the cooling system’s key pumps at the complex’s troubled Unit 2 no longer worked – meaning replacements have to be brought in.

The evacuation from the plant came after smoke began rising from the spent fuel storage pool of the plant’s problem-plagued Unit 3, which also alarmed plant officials over the weekend with a sudden surge of pressure in its reactor core.

Problems set off by the disasters have ranged far beyond the shattered north-east coast and the wrecked nuclear plant, handing the government what it has called Japan’s worst crisis since the Second World War.

Rebuilding may cost as much as $235bn and the death toll will exceed 18,000.

Traces of radiation are contaminating vegetables and some water supplies, although in amounts the government says do not pose a risk to human health in the short term.

Sale of raw milk, spinach and canola from prefectures over a swathe from the plant toward Tokyo have been banned. The government has just started to test fish and shellfish.

“Please do not overreact, and act calmly,” Chief Cabinet spokesman Yukio Edano said in the government’s latest appeal to ease public concerns. “Even if you eat contaminated vegetables several times, it will not harm your health at all.”

The ongoing nuclear crisis is raising additional fears in the country where the search for some 12,800 people still missing after last week’s earthquake and tsunami continues. Japan’s National Police Agency said the number of bodies collected so far stood at 8,649.

The death toll is steadily rising as searchers in the devastated north east of the country find bodies in the wastelands left behind by the powerful quake and the massive tsunami it unleashed. The tsunami is likely to have swept many bodies out to sea, as it did in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when many of the dead were never found.

The tallies of dead and missing are likely to overlap. Many of the bodies collected have not yet been identified so it is likely many of them will match names on the missing list once their identities are confirmed.

Officials at the World Bank yesterday said Japan may need five years to rebuild after the catastrophe which has caused up to $235bn of damage. In a report it said the disaster is likely to shave up to 0.5 per cent from the country’s economic growth this year, with the impact concentrated in the first half of the year.

“Damage to housing and infrastructure has been unprecedented,” the World Bank said.