Japan, however, continues to suffer from the lethal combination of natural and technological disasters. The death toll from the March 11 quake and tsunami reached 7,197, with 10,905 missing, according to the National Police Agency.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan sought to assure his countrymen that Japan will rebuild. But his words came amid doubt that the nation’s leaders have a firm grip on the nuclear crisis. The government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. have issued a thin and fitful stream of information about the radiation-spewing plant.
In recent days, officials in Tokyo and Washington have sent different signals about the level of hazard posed by the damaged nuclear reactors. U.S. officials have advised Americans to evacuate from a much broader region of Japan. Japanese authorities implicitly acknowledged Friday that they had underestimated the severity of the nuclear crisis, as they re-categorized the emergency as a level-5 event, up from level 4, on the International Nuclear Event Scale. That is still shy of a level 7 catastrophe, which would be akin to the 1986 Chernobyl event in Ukraine.
Japanese emergency workers ramped up efforts to stabilize the rapidly deteriorating Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant Saturday, racing to reestablish electrical power to portions of the facility and establishing an automated water canon to drench two reactors for up to seven consecutive hours.
Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the renewed attempts to regain control had shown signs of success at the No. 3 nuclear reactor, the highest priority for officials aiming to cool spent fuel rods that have begun spewing radioactive material in the atmosphere. But he acknowledged that the gains could be temporary.
“As of now we cannot say anything definite, but we think we have succeeded in putting a certain level of water in Unit 3 and we think that it is in a certain stable situation,” Edano said. “We have been able to prevent the situation from worsening ... but I believe we are reaching a big turning point.”
Meanwhile, Edano said, milk and spinach found within nearly 20 miles of the damaged plant in Ibaraki and Fukushima prefectures were found to have higher than normal levels of radiation contamination after initial tests by government scientists.
Although he stressed that the amounts of radiation posed no health risk for humans, Edano said further tests would be conducted and that the government would ban any contaminated food products from the marketplace. The ingestion of milk by children near Chernobyl, after an accident at the Soviet nuclear facility in 1986, was blamed as the cause of thousands of cancer cases.
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