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Twenty-one hurt in Japanese nuclear accident Japan's worst nuclear accident exposed 21 people to radiation at a uranium processing plant on Thursday, with officials telling 300,000 people living in the area to remain indoors. A local government official told Reuters early on Friday the radiation level was 15,000 times above normal two km (1.2 miles) from the plant, too high to allow officials to investigate the scope of the calamity. The incident occurred around 10:35 a.m. on Thursday at the plant at Tokaimura in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 140 km (90 miles) northeast of Tokyo. The sick included 14 workers, five local residents and two people working on a nearby golf course. "There is a strong possibility that abnormal reactions are continuing within the facility," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka told an emergency news conference late on Thursday. Officials evacuated 60 residents and told more than 300,000 people living in the area to stay indoors. The village of Tokaimura itself has a population of around 34,000 people and is home to 15 nuclear-related facilities. "We believe that it is a severe situation, and there are concerns about radiation in the surrounding areas," Nonaka said. He said this was believed to be the worst nuclear accident so far in Japan. Tokaimura was also the scene of a nuclear plant incident in 1997 in which 37 workers suffered radiation contamination. A government statement said nuclear experts had started the process of removing the coolant water leaking from the plant to lower the radiation level. CHEMICAL WARFARE UNIT SENT The government also sent a 16-member chemical warfare unit from the Self Defence Forces to the area, although officials said the troops were ill-equipped for such an incident. While it was still too early to determine exactly what had happened, officials suspected that an employee at the private facility, which reprocesses uranium into pellets for nuclear power plants, had loaded 16 kg (35 lbs) of uranium into a container, nearly eight times the normal amount. Officials say this may have created a "critical mass" allowing a nuclear reaction to start similar to what occurs in a nuclear power plant. The sick, two believed to be critically ill, were taken to hospital and some were later transferred by helicopter to a specialised hospital in Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo, officials said. A doctor who treated three workers told a televised news conference: "Judging from the symptoms, they appeared to have received quite a substantial amount of radiation and we will need to keep a close eye on their conditions." The incident prompted Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi to cancel a planned reshuffling of his cabinet. France's nuclear safety institute said the reported "criticality" accident would be the 60th in the world since 1945, following 33 such accidents in the United States and 19 in the former Soviet Union. "Generally criticality accidents have more significant consequences at the site of the installation involved than on the environment," the institute, which has close ties with nuclear agencies worldwide, said in a statement. WORKER SAID USING 16 KG OF URANIUM Japanese media quoted an official at the plant operator JCO Co, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co , as saying one of the workers had used about 16 kg of uranium during a process just before the accident. Workers normally use up to 2.3 kg of uranium in each procedure to prevent a criticality accident, they said. Nuclear experts said that the processing of uranium into nuclear fuel can unleash radioactive energy in an uncontrolled way. The uncontrolled release is known in industry jargon as "criticality," which occurs when a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. If a self-sustaining reaction is not stopped, it may go out of control, resulting in an accidental release, according to the British-based Uranium Institute. U.S. nuclear scientists said it appeared what had happened in Japan was far less dangerous than when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in Ukraine in April 1986, killing 31 people and contaminating areas of the former Soviet Union. "I don't think that it will be a long-term problem," said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "This appears to be a local disaster and not a global one." Criticality has happened at other processing plants around the world, including a Rhode Island facility in 1964. In that instance, some workers were injured, according to one U.S. nuclear industry official. Anti-nuclear activists said the accident, the latest in a series to plague Japan, would cast doubt on the safety of the entire nuclear programme. Greenpeace said in a statement that Thursday's accident "confirms our fears. The entire safety culture within Japan is in crisis." |