Emergency Cooling Effort at Reactor Is Failing, Deepening Japanese Crisis

 TOKYO — Japan’s struggle to contain the crisis at a stricken nuclear power plant worsened early Tuesday morning, as emergency operations to pump seawater into one crippled reactor temporarily failed, increasing the risk of a wider release of radioactive material, officials said.
With the cooling systems malfunctioning simultaneously at three separate reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station after the powerful earthquake and tsunami, a more acute crisis developed late Monday at reactor No. 2 of the plant. There, a series of problems thwarted efforts to keep the core of the reactor covered with water — a step considered crucial to preventing the reactor’s containment vessel from exploding and preventing the fuel inside it from melting down.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said late Monday that efforts to inject seawater into the reactor had failed. That caused water levels inside the reactor’s containment vessel to fall and exposed its fuel rods. The company said its workers later succeeded in infusing seawater in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday morning, but fuel rods were exposed for at least several hours.
Workers had been having difficulty injecting seawater into the reactor because its vents — necessary to release pressure in the containment vessel by allowing radioactive steam to escape — had stopped working properly, they said.
But Tuesday morning Tokyo Electric announced that workers had succeeded in opening a malfunctioning valve controlling the vents, reducing pressure in the container vessel. It then resumed flooding the reactor with water.
The company said water levels were not immediately rising to the desired level, possibly because of a leak in the containment vessel. Still, a Tokyo Electric official said the situation was improving.
"We do not feel that a critical event is imminent," he told a press conference.
The release of pressure appears to avert the immediate risk that the containment vessel would explode, creating a potentially catastrophic release of radioactive material into the atmosphere. But if the vessel is cracked and is not holding water properly, the risks of a large scale release of radioactive material would remain high.
In reactor No. 2, which is now the most damaged of the three at the Daiichi plant, at least parts of the fuel rods have been exposed for several hours, which also suggests that some of the fuel has begun to melt. Government and company officials said fuel melting has almost certainly occurred in that reactor, which can increase releases of radioactive material through the water and steam that escapes from the container vessel.
In a worst case, the fuel pellets could also burn through the bottom of the containment vessel and radioactive material could pour out that way — often referred to as a full meltdown.
"There is a possibility that the fuel rods are heating up and starting to melt,” said a Tokyo Electric spokesman told a late-night conference on Monday, televised on public broadcaster NHK. “It is our understanding that we have possible damage to the fuel rods,” he said.
By Monday night, officials said that radiation readings around the plant reached 3,130 micro Sievert, the highest yet detected at the Daiichi facility since the quake and six times the legal limit. Radiation levels of that magnitude are considered elevated, but they are much lower than would be the case if one of the container vessels had been compromised.
Industry executvies in touch with their counterparts in Japan Monday night grew increasingly alarmed about the risks posed by the No. 2 reactor.
“They’re basically in a full-scale panic” among Japanese power industry managers, said a senior nuclear industry executive. The executive is not involved in managing the response to the reactors’ difficulties but has many contacts in Japan. “They’re in total disarray, they don’t know what to do.”
The venting problems made it impossible for a time to administer the emergency remedy the plant operator had been using to control heat at the three crippled Daiichi reactors, all of which experienced failures in their electronic cooling systems. That remedy involves pumping in seawater to cool the fuel rods, then opening vents to release the resulting steam pressure that builds in the container vessel. When the vessel is depressurized, workers can inject more seawater, a process known as “feed and bleed.” 

The extreme challenge of managing reactor No. 2 came as officials were still struggling to keep the cores of two other reactors, No. 1 and No. 3, covered with seawater. There was no immediate indication that either of those two reactors had experienced a crisis as serious as that at No. 2.
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that the Japanese government had formally asked for assistance as it responds to the crisis in Fukushima. As part of a wider response, the United States has already dispatched two experts in boiling-water reactors, the type used at Daiichi. They are in Tokyo offering technical assistance to the Japanese, the commission said in a statement. The commission is considering further assistance, including providing technical advice, it said.
The situation at Daiichi was also complicated on Monday by another problem when the outer structure housing reactor No. 3 exploded earlier on Monday. A similar explosion destroyed the structure surrounding reactor No. 1 on Saturday. Live footage on public broadcaster NHK showed the skeletal remains of the reactor building and thick smoke rising from the building. Eleven people had been injured in the blast, one seriously, officials said.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said earlier Monday evening that the release of large amounts of radiation as a result of the explosion at No. 3 was unlikely because the blast did not compromise the steel containment vessel inside the No. 3 reactor. But traces of radiation could be released into the atmosphere, and about 500 people who remained within a 12-mile radius were ordered temporarily to take cover indoors, he said.
“I have received reports that the containment vessel is sound,” Mr. Edano said. “I understand that there is little possibility that radioactive materials are being released in large amounts.”
Mr. Edano and other senior officials did not address the escalating crisis at reactor No. 2 later Monday or early Tuesday.
But the situation a reactor No. 3 was being closely watched for another reason. That reactor uses a special mix of nuclear fuel known as MOX fuel. MOX is considered contentious because it is made with reprocessed plutonium and uranium oxides. Any radioactive plume from that fuel would be more dangerous than ordinary nuclear fuel, experts say, because inhaling plutonium even in very small quantities is considered lethal.
In screenings, higher-than-normal levels of radiation have been detected from at least 22 people evacuated from near the plant, the nuclear safety watchdog said, but it is not clear if the doses they received were dangerous.
Technicians had been scrambling most of Sunday to fix a mechanical failure that left the reactor far more vulnerable to explosions.
The two reactors where the explosions occurred are both presumed to have already suffered partial meltdowns — a dangerous situation that, if unchecked, could lead to a full meltdown.

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Nuclear Plants in Europe Are Delayed

 BERLIN — With the crisis in Japan raising fears about nuclear power, Germany and Switzerland said on Monday that they would reassess the safety of their own reactors and possibly reduce their reliance on them.
Doris Leuthard, the Swiss energy minister, said Switzerland would suspend plans to build and replace nuclear plants. She said no new ones would be permitted until experts had reviewed safety standards and reported back. Their conclusions will apply to existing plants as well as planned sites, she added. Swiss authorities recently approved three sites for new nuclear power stations.
Germany will suspend “the recently decided extension of the running times of German nuclear power plants,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin. “This is a moratorium and this moratorium will run for three months.” She said the suspension would allow for a thorough examination of the safety standards of the county’s 17 nuclear power plants.
“There will be no taboos,” Mrs. Merkel said.
Even when the three months is over, Mrs. Merkel warned, there would be no going back to the situation before the moratorium.
Across Europe, officials worried about the Continent’s use of nuclear power as cooling systems failed at a third nuclear reactor in Japan and officials in that country struggled to regain control.
The European Union called for a meeting on Tuesday of nuclear safety authorities and operators to assess Europe’s preparedness. Austria’s environment minister, Nikolaus Berlakovich, called for a European Union-wide stress test “to see if our nuclear power stations are earthquake-proof.”
In Germany, with Mrs. Merkel’s center-right coalition facing important regional elections this month, the move was apparently in part an effort to placate the influential antinuclear lobby and give her coalition some breathing space before making a final decision about nuclear energy.
The foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, called for a new risk analysis of the country’s nuclear plants, particularly regarding their cooling systems. He is the leader of the pro-business Free Democratic Party, which strongly supports nuclear power.
A previous government, led by the Social Democrats and Greens, pushed through legislation in 2001 to close all of the country’s nuclear plants by 2021. But Mrs. Merkel’s center-right government reversed that decision last year and voted to extend the lives of the plants by an average of 12 years.
Nuclear energy provides about 11 percent of Germany’s energy supply but its contribution to electricity output is about 26 percent.
In Switzerland, the suspension of plans to build and replace plants will affect all “blanket authorization for nuclear replacement until safety standards have been carefully reviewed and if necessary adapted,” Ms. Leuthard, the energy minister, said in a statement.
Switzerland has five nuclear reactors, which produce about 40 percent of the country’s energy needs.
Ms. Leuthard said she had already asked the Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate to analyze the exact cause of the problems in Japan and draw up new or tougher safety standards “particularly in terms of seismic safety and cooling.”
In Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said his government would not revise its ambitious program of building nuclear reactors but would “draw conclusions from what’s going on in Japan,” Russian news agencies reported. Nuclear power currently accounts for 16 percent of Russia’s electricity generation.

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E.U.'s Latest Rescue Package Seen Falling Short-Again

LONDON — Another missed opportunity for Europe?
Over the past year, the European Union and the International Monetary fund have pledged €640 billion in bailout funds to distressed economies on the Continent’s periphery. Yet the interest rates on benchmark bonds in Greece, Ireland and Portugal remain at or near their historic highs.
Pressed yet again by a skeptical market to take action, Europe’s leaders cobbled together a new structure over the weekend that will allow its rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to disburse its entire €440 billion, or $615 billion, allotment if needed, and to buy bonds at government auctions. They also eased the conditions on Greece’s rescue loans by reducing interest rates and extending repayment terms.
Analysts and investors greeted the effort Monday with cautious approval, as euro zone finance ministers regrouped to work out more details.
But as has often been the case with grand European rescue plans, there appears to be a catch: While the European rescue facility can now buy bonds at government auctions, it will not be able to purchase paper in the secondary market. That will heap more pressure on an ever-reluctant European Central Bank to remain in its job as peripheral Europe’s buyer of last resort.
What is more, the plan states that the fund can buy bonds only from countries that have taken bailout funds, an odd stipulation that means that the country most in need of support at the moment — Portugal — does not get any.
Consequently, pressure on Portuguese 10-year bonds eased only slightly Monday, with interest rates sticking close to the 7.4 percent level at which they have traded for the past few weeks. Greek bonds rallied on the interest rate deal, but Irish bonds made only the smallest move as they did not receive a break on their interest rate. Spanish yields fell to 5.2 percent, still close to their high of 5.4 percent.
“What we have now falls short of what is required, which is a way to bring interest rates down,” said Dirk Hoffman-Becking, a banking analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London.
Mr. Hoffman-Becking argued that these persistently high rates only recycled fear and uncertainty via higher funding costs for banks and, ultimately, lower economic growth. He added that unless the E.F.S.F. stepped into the secondary market to buy bonds in large quantities, rates would remain high. That is because private investors remain unwilling to buy given the risk of default and the risk that austerity programs will undermine economic recovery.
Again, the example of Portugal is relevant. Last Friday, the government in Lisbon promised more spending cuts and revenue-raising measures to make good on its promise to bring the budget deficit down to 4.6 percent of gross domestic product, from 7.4 percent this year. But with one of the lowest growth rates in Europe, an uncompetitive export industry and public debt at 80 percent of G.D.P., investors see little upside in buying Portuguese bonds now, even at such wide spreads to comparable German bonds.
For the most part, the E.C.B. has been unwilling to step in aggressively — it has purchased only €77 billion in peripheral-country bonds so far. On Monday, the bank reported that it had not bought any bonds last week, for the second week in a row.
Thus, the lack of a big buyer is expected to keep rates high and continue to feed market unease. And that in many ways remains the unsolved root of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.
Euro zone governments and the I.M.F. are asking that investors take a leap of faith and accept that the bone-crunching austerity programs in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, underpinned by tax increases and sharp wage reductions, will reduce deficits and ultimately high levels of debt.
But, as a comprehensive new report on the origins of Europe’s debt crisis by the investment bank Nomura points out, what is more likely to happen is that the debt of countries like Greece and Ireland will merely increase in what economists call a snowball effect, as the interest rate on the government’s debt grows faster than their stagnating economies.
That problem will only be compounded when the European Central Bank increases interest rates, which it has warned it will do.
The result is a Catch-22 of sorts: the faster and deeper these countries cut, the slower they grow, with the perverse effect that their debt ends up increasing as opposed to decreasing.
“In the short term, this problem is inevitable — your debt will continue to increase as long as your growth rate is below the interest rate you are paying,” said Peter Westaway, European economist at Nomura in London and one of the authors of the report.
In 2013, for example, Greece’s debt will have increased to almost 160 percent of G.D.P. from 127 percent of G.D.P. And while the country was quick to hail its improved terms, the bottom line still remains that by 2014 it must begin paying interest equivalent to about 8 percent of its G.D.P. — a huge amount by any measure.
For now, Greece has time. But with growth expected to shrink again this year, by 3.4 percent, and with unemployment now at about 15 percent, how long the Greek government, or any government for that matter, can continue to expect so much public sacrifice to pay off its bankers remains to be seen.

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Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say

WASHINGTON — As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.
The emergency flooding of two stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.
But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed, but presumed to include Cesium-137 and Iodine-121 — suggesting widening environmental contamination. In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche and national politics, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate.
Japanese reactor operators now have little choice but to periodically release radioactive steam until the radioactive elements in the fuel of the stricken reactors stop generating intense heat, a process that can continue for a year or more even after the fission process has stopped. To control that heat, the plant’s operator must constantly try to flood the reactors with seawater, then release the resulting radioactive steam into the atmosphere, several experts familiar with the design of the Daiichi facility said. That suggests that the 200,000 people who have been evacuated may not be able to return to their homes for a considerable period and that shifts in the wind could blow radioactive materials toward Japanese cities rather than out to sea.
Re-establishing normal cooling of the reactors would require restoring electric power — which was cut in the earthquake and tsunami — and now may require plant technicians working in areas that have become highly contaminated with radioactivity.
More steam releases also mean that the plume headed across the Pacific could continue to grow. On Sunday evening, the White House sought to tamp down concerns, saying that modeling done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had concluded that “Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are not expected to experience any harmful levels of radioactivity.”
But all weekend, after a series of intense interchanges between Tokyo and Washington and the arrival of the first American nuclear experts in Japan, officials said they were beginning to get a clearer picture of what went wrong over the past three days, and as one senior official put it, “under the best scenarios, this isn’t going to end anytime soon.”
The essential problem is the definition of “off” in a nuclear reactor. When the nuclear chain reaction is shut and the reactor shuts down, the fuel is still producing about 6 percent as much heat as it did when it was running, because of continuing heat generation by the radioactivity, the release of subatomic particles and of gamma rays.
Usually, when a reactor is first shut down, an electrically driven pump pulls heated water from the vessel to a heat exchanger, and cool water from a river or ocean is brought in to draw off that heat.
But at the Japanese reactors, after losing electric power, that system could not be used. Instead the operators are dumping seawater into the vessel, and letting it cool the fuel by boiling. But as it boils, pressure rises too high to pump in more water, so they have to vent the vessel to the atmosphere, and feed in more water, a procedure known as “feed and bleed.”
When the fuel was intact, the steam they were releasing had only modest amounts of radioactive material, in a nontroublesome form. With damaged fuel, that steam is getting dirtier.
Re-establishing normal cooling will require electric power and may require workers to function in areas that are now contaminated, American nuclear experts say.
Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, “normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one.” Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said. 
Fukushima was designed by General Electric, just as Oyster Creek was, at about the same time, and the two plants are very similar, he said. The problem, he said, was that the hook-up is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.
Another nuclear engineer with long experience in reactors of this type, who now works for a government agency, was emphatic. “To completely stop venting, they’re going to have to put some sort of equipment back in service,” he said. He asked not to be named because his agency had not authorized him to speak.
The central problem arises from a series of failures that began after the tsunami. It easily overcame the sea walls surrounding the Fukushima plant. It swamped the diesel generators, which were placed in a low-lying area, apparently because of misplaced confidence that the sea walls would protect them. At 3:41 p.m. Friday, roughly an hour after the quake and just around the time the region would have been struck by the giant waves, the generators shut down. According to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant switched to an emergency cooling system that operates on batteries, but these were soon depleted.
Inside the plant, according to industry executives and American experts who received briefings over the weekend, there was deep concern that spent nuclear fuel that was kept in a “cooling pond” inside one of the plants had been exposed and begun letting off potentially deadly gamma radiation. Then water levels inside the reactor cores began to fall. While estimates vary, several officials and industry experts said on Sunday that the top four to nine feet of the nuclear fuel in the core and control rods appear to have been exposed to the air — a condition that that can quickly lead to melting, and ultimately to a complete meltdown.
At 8 p.m., just as Americans were waking up to news of the earthquake, the government declared an emergency, contradicting its earlier reassurances that there were no major problems. But the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, stressed that there had been no radiation leak.
But one was coming: Workers inside the reactors saw that levels of coolant water were dropping. They did not know how severely. “The gauges that measure the water level don’t appear to be giving accurate readings,” one American official said.
What the workers knew by Saturday morning was that cooling systems at a nearby power plant, Fukushima Daini, were also starting to fail, for many of the same reasons. And the pressure in the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi was rising so fast that engineers knew they would have to relieve it by letting steam escape, sending the first traces of radiation into the atmosphere.
Shortly before 4 p.m., camera crews near the Daiichi plant captured what appears to have been an explosion at the No. 1 reactor — apparently caused by a buildup of hydrogen. It was dramatic television but not especially dangerous — except to the workers injured by the force of the blast inside.
The explosion was in the outer container, leaving the main reactor vessel unharmed, according to Tokyo Electric’s reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The walls of the outer building blew apart, as they are designed to do, rather than allow a buildup of pressure that could damage the reactor vessel.)
But the dramatic blast was also a warning sign of what could happen inside the reactor vessel if the core was not cooled. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that “as a countermeasure to limit damage to the reactor core,” Tokyo Electric proposed injecting seawater mixed with boron — which can absorb some of the reactive elements — and it began to do that at 10:20 p.m. Saturday.
It was a desperation move: The corrosive seawater will essentially disable the 40-year-old plant; the decision to flood the core amounted to a decision to abandon the facility. But even that operation has not been easy.
To pump in the water, the Japanese have apparently tried used fire-fighting equipment — hardly the usual procedure. But forcing the seawater inside the containment vessel has been extraordinarily difficult, because the pressure in the vessel has become so great.
One American official likened the process to “trying to pour water into an inflated balloon,” and said that on Sunday it was “not clear how much water they are getting in, or whether they are covering the cores.”
The problem was compounded because gauges inside the reactor seemed to have been damaged in the earthquake or the tsunami, making it impossible to know just how much water is in the core.
And workers attempting the pumping operation are presumed to be exposed to radiation; several workers, according to Japanese reports, have been treated for radiation poisoning. It is not clear how severe their exposure was.

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Danger Posed by Radioactivity in Japan Hard to Assess

The different radioactive materials being reported at the nuclear accidents in Japan range from relatively benign to extremely worrisome. 

The central problem in assessing the degree of danger is that the amounts of various radioactive releases into the environment are now unknown, as are the winds and other atmospheric factors that determine how radiation-emitting materials will disperse around the stricken plants.
Still, the properties of the materials and their typical interactions with the human body give some indication of the threat.

“The situation is pretty bad,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches international affairs at Princeton. “But it could get a lot worse.”

In Vienna on Saturday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Japanese authorities had informed it that iodine pills would be distributed to residents around the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants in northeast Japan. Both have experienced multiple failures in the wake of the huge earthquake and tsunami that struck Friday.
In the types of reactors involved, water is used to cool the reactor core and produce steam to turn the turbines that make electricity. The water contains two of the least dangerous radioactive materials now in the news — radioactive nitrogen and tritium. Normal plant operations produce both of them in the cooling water, and they are even released routinely in small amounts into the environment, usually through tall chimneys.

Nitrogen is the most common gas in the earth’s atmosphere, and at a nuclear plant the main radioactive form is known as nitrogen-16. It is made when speeding neutrons from the reactor’s core hit oxygen in the surrounding cooling water. This radioactive form of nitrogen does not occur in nature.

The danger of nitrogen-16 is an issue only for plant workers and operators because its half-life is only seven seconds, after which it decays back into natural nitrogen. A half-life is the time it takes half the atoms of a radioactive substance to disintegrate.
The other radioactive material often in the cooling water of a nuclear reactor is tritium. It is a naturally occurring radioactive form of hydrogen, sometimes known as heavy hydrogen. It is found in trace amounts in groundwater throughout the world. Tritium emits a weak form of radiation that does not travel very far in the air and cannot penetrate the skin.
It accumulates in the cooling water of nuclear reactors and is often vented in small amounts to the environment. Its half-life is 12 years.

The big worries on the reported releases of radioactive material in Japan center on radioactive iodine and cesium.

“They imply some kind of core problem,” said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington.
The active core of a nuclear reactor splits atoms in two to produce bursts of energy and, as a byproduct, large masses of highly radioactive particles. The many safety mechanisms of a nuclear plant focus mainly on keeping these so-called fission products out of the environment.
Iodine-131 has a half-life of eight days and is quite dangerous to human health. If absorbed through contaminated food, especially milk and milk products, it will accumulate in the thyroid and cause cancer. Located near the base of the neck, the thyroid is a large endocrine gland that produces hormones that help control growth and metabolism.

Dr. von Hippel of Princeton said the thyroid danger was gravest in children. “The thyroid is more sensitive to damage when the cells are dividing and the gland is growing,” he said.
Fortunately, an easy form of protection is potassium iodide, a simple compound typically added to table salt to prevent goiter and a form of mental retardation caused by a dietary lack of iodine.
If ingested promptly after a nuclear accident, potassium iodide, in concentrated form, can help reduce the dose of radiation to the thyroid and thus the risk of cancer. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommends that people living within a 10-mile emergency planning zone around a nuclear plant have access to potassium iodide tablets.
Over the long term, the big threat to human health is cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.
At that rate of disintegration, John Emsley wrote in “Nature’s Building Blocks” (Oxford, 2001), “it takes over 200 years to reduce it to 1 percent of its former level.”

It is cesium-137 that still contaminates much of the land in Ukraine around the Chernobyl reactor. In 1986, the plant suffered what is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history.
Cesium-137 mixes easily with water and is chemically similar to potassium. It thus mimics how potassium gets metabolized in the body and can enter through many foods, including milk. After entering, cesium gets widely distributed, its concentrations said to be higher in muscle tissues and lower in bones.
The radiation from cesium-137 can throw cellular machinery out of order, including the chromosomes, leading to an increased risk of cancer.

The Environmental Protection Agency says that everyone in the United States is exposed to very small amounts of cesium-137 in soil and water because of atmospheric fallout from the nuclear detonations of the cold war.
The agency says that very high exposures can result in serious burns and even death, but that such cases are extremely rare. Once dispersed in the environment, it says, cesium-137 “is impossible to avoid.”
 
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

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Cuba Gives 15-Year Prison Term to American

A Cuban court sentenced an American government contractor, Alan Gross, to 15 years in prison for crimes against the state, Cuban state television reported Saturday.
Mr. Gross, 61, was detained in December 2009 while on a U.S.A.I.D. mission in Cuba designed to weaken the government. Cuban authorities said that Mr. Gross was distributing satellite telephone equipment, which could be sued to access the Internet, to Jewish groups in Cuba. Those groups have denied having anything to do with him.

The prosecution was seeking a 20-year sentence.
A panel of judges found that the evidence “demonstrated the participation of the North American contractor in a subversive project of the U.S. government that aimed to destroy the Revolution through the use of communications systems out of the control of authorities,” the Associated Press reported Saturday.

The United State National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, criticized the ruling and called again for Mr. Gross to be released. “Today’s sentencing adds another injustice to Alan Gross’s ordeal,” he said. “He has already spent too many days in detention and should not spend one more.”

Mr. Gross’ detention has been a point of contention between the United States and the Cuban government, even as President Obama has loosened restrictions on travel for groups like scholars and artists and pledged renewed engagement with the Cuban people.
Most political observers have said they expect Mr. Gross to be released on humanitarian grounds. 

He has lost some 90 pounds while in detention, and his daughter had a double mastectomy after a cancer diagnosis last year.

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Japan Floods Nuclear Reactor Crippled by Quake in Effort to Avert Meltdown

TOKYO — Japanese officials took the extraordinary step on Saturday of flooding a crippled nuclear reactor with seawater in a last-ditch effort to avoid a nuclear meltdown, as the nation grappled simultaneously with its worst nuclear mishap and the aftermath of its largest recorded earthquake. 

A radiation leak and explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Saturday prompted the government to expand an evacuation order to affect 170,000 people in the plant’s vicinity. And the plant’s operator issued an emergency notice early Sunday morning that a second reactor at the same aging plant was also experiencing critical failures of its cooling system and that rising pressure there risked a new explosion.
The government said radiation emanating from the first reactor appeared to be decreasing after the blast Saturday afternoon destroyed part of the facility, and they said that they had filled it with sea water to prevent full meltdown of the nuclear fuel. That step would only be taken in extreme circumstances because ocean water is likely to permanently disable the reactor.

The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial safety agency said as many as 160 people may have been exposed to radiation around the plant, and Japanese news media said three workers at the facility were suffering from full-on radiation sickness.
Even if Japan manages to avoid large, uncontrolled releases of radiation that would result from a meltdown, the problems at the Fukushima facility already amounted to the worst nuclear accident in Japan’s history and perhaps the biggest malfunction at a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago, the worst ever.
The handling of the crisis and vulnerability of Japan’s extensive nuclear facilities to earthquakes and tsunamis will also add to long-simmering grass-roots resistance against nuclear power within Japan, where people have learned to doubt the industry’s reliability as well as anodyne official statements about safety.
Even before the explosion on Saturday, officials said they had detected radioactive cesium, which is created when uranium fuel is split, an indication that some of the nuclear fuel in the reactor was already damaged — a situation sometimes referred to as a partial meltdown. How much damage the fuel suffered remained uncertain, though safety officials insisted repeatedly through the day that radiation leaks outside the plant remained small.

Although officials said the leaks did not pose a major health risk, they also told the International Atomic Energy Agency that they were making preparations to distribute iodine, which helps protect the thyroid gland from radiation exposure, to people living near Daiichi and a second nuclear plant that suffered damage in the quake, called Daini, about 10 miles away.
Worries about the safety of the two plants were worsened on Saturday because government officials and executives of Tokyo Electric Power, which runs the plant, gave confusing accounts of the causes of the dramatic midday explosion and the damage it caused. Late Saturday night, officials said that the explosion occurred in a structure housing turbines near the No. 1 reactor at the plant rather than inside the reactor itself.

The blast, apparently caused by a sharp buildup of pressure or of hydrogen when the reactor’s cooling system failed after the quake, destroyed the concrete structure surrounding the reactor but did not collapse the critical steel container inside, they said. They said that raised the chances they could continue cooling the core, and prevent the release of large amounts of radioactive material and avoid a full core meltdown at the plant.

“We’ve confirmed that the reactor container was not damaged,” Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said in a news conference on Saturday night. “The explosion didn’t occur inside the reactor container. As such there was no large amount of radiation leakage outside. At this point, there has been no major change to the level of radiation leakage outside, so we’d like everyone to respond calmly.” 

 Mr. Edano said that, in addition to filling the reactor with seawater, Tokyo Electric Power workers also added boric acid to the containment vessel on Saturday night to poison the nuclear chain reaction. Mr. Edano said that the operation could “prevent criticality.”

He said radioactive materials had leaked outside the plant before the explosion, but that the explosion did not worsen the leak and that, in fact, measured levels of radioactive emission had been decreasing. He did not specify the levels of radiation involved.
Naoto Sekimura, a professor at Tokyo University, told NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, that “only a small portion of the fuel has been melted. But the plant is shut down already, and being cooled down. Most of the fuel is contained in the plant case, so I would like to ask people to be calm.”

Japanese nuclear safety officials and international experts said that because of crucial design differences, the release of radiation at the Fukushima plant would most likely be much smaller than at Chernobyl even if the Fukushima plant had suffered a complete core meltdown, which they said it had not.

But the vulnerability of nuclear plants to earthquakes was also underscored by continuing problems at the cooling system of reactors at the second nearby plant, Daini, which prompted a evacuation of 30,000 from surrounding communities. Together, the authorities sought to move about 200,000 people around the two plants, a massive logistical task at a time when rescue workers also sought to help people trapped on injured in the earthquake.
After a full day of worries about leaking radiation at the Daiichi plant after its cooling systems malfunctioned, Tokyo Electric Power said an explosion occurred “near” the No. 1 reactor at Daiichi around 3:40 p.m. Japan time on Saturday. It said four of its workers were injured in the blast.



The decision to flood the reactor core with seawater, experts said, was an indication that Tokyo Electric and Japanese authorities had probably decided to scrap the plant, because the salt water would corrode its delicate metal innards. “This plant is almost 40 years old, and now it’s over for that place,” Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector for the I.A.E.A., and now a visiting scholar at Harvard, said on Saturday.
Mr. Heinonen lived in Japan in the 1980s, monitoring its nuclear industry, and visited the stricken plant many times. Based on the reports he was seeing, he said he believed that the explosion was caused by a hydrogen formation, which could have begun inside the reactor core. “Now, every hour they gain in keeping the reactor cooling down is crucial,” he said.

But he was also concerned about the presence of spent nuclear fuel in a pool inside the same reactor building. The pool, too, needs to remain full of water, to suppress gamma radiation and prevent the old fuel from melting. If the spent fuel is also exposed — and so far there are only sketchy reports about the condition of that building — it could also pose a significant risk to the workers trying to prevent a meltdown in the core.
Both the Daiichi and Daini plants were shut down by Friday’s earthquake. But the loss of power in the area and damage to the plant’s generators from the subsequent tsunami crippled the cooling systems, which need to function after a shutdown to cool down nuclear fuel rods.
Malfunctioning cooling systems allowed pressure to build up beyond the design capacity of the reactors. Early Saturday, officials had said that small amounts of radioactive vapor were expected to be released into the atmosphere to prevent damage to the containment systems and that they were evacuating tens of thousands of people living around the plants as a precaution.

Those releases apparently did not prevent the buildup of hydrogen inside the plant, which ignited and exploded Saturday afternoon, government officials said. They said the explosion itself did not increase the amount of radioactive material being released into the atmosphere. But safety officials also urged people who were not evacuating but still lived relatively near the plants to cover 

David Lochbaum, who worked at three reactors in the United States similar to the Fukushima design, and who was later hired by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to teach its personnel about that technology, said that from pictures he had seen of the stricken plant, the explosion appeared to have occurred in the turbine hall, and not the reactor vessel or the containment that surrounds the vessel.  

The technology used at Fukushima is called a boiling-water reactor, in which the reactor, inside a containment, sends its steam out of containment to a turbine. The turbine converts the steam’s energy into rotary motion, which turns a generator and makes electricity.
But as the water goes through the reactor, some water molecules break up into hydrogen and oxygen. A system in the turbine hall usually scrubs out those gases. Hydrogen is also used in the turbine hall to cool the electric generator. Hydrogen from both sources has sometimes escaped and exploded, he said, but in this case, there is an additional source of hydrogen: interaction of steam with the metal of the fuel rods. Operators may have vented that hydrogen into the turbine hall.

Earlier Saturday, before the explosion, a Japanese nuclear safety panel said the radiation levels were 1,000 times above normal in a reactor control room at the Daiichi plant. Some radioactive material had also seeped outside, with radiation levels near the main gate measured at eight times normal, NHK quoted nuclear safety officials as saying.
The emergency at the Daiichi plant began shortly after the earthquake struck on Friday afternoon. Emergency diesel generators, which had kicked in to run the reactor’s cooling system after the electrical power grid failed, shut down about an hour after the earthquake. There was speculation that the tsunami had flooded the generators and knocked them out of service.
For some time after the quake, the plant was operating in a battery-controlled cooling mode. Tokyo 
Electric said that by Saturday morning it had also installed a mobile generator at Daiichi to ensure that the cooling system would continue operating even after reserve battery power was depleted. Even so, the company said it needed to conduct “controlled containment venting” in order to avoid an “uncontrolled rupture and damage” to the containment unit.

Why the controlled release of pressure did not succeed in addressing the problem at the reactor was not immediately explained. Tokyo Electric and government nuclear safety officials also did not explain the precise sequence of failures at the plant.
Daiichi and other nuclear facilities are designed with extensive backup systems that are supposed to function in emergencies to ensure the plants can be shut down safely.
At Daiichi, a pump run by steam, designed to function in the absence of electricity, was adding water to the reactor vessel, and as that water boiled off, the steam was being released. Such water is usually only slightly radioactive, according to nuclear experts. As long as the fuel stays covered by water, it will remain intact, and the bulk of the radioactive material will stay inside. But if fresh water cannot be pumped into the containment vessel and the cooling water evaporates, the nuclear fuel is exposed, which can result in a meltdown.

Japan, with no substantial coal or oil, relies heavily on nuclear power, which generates just over one-third of the country’s electricity. Its plants are designed to withstand earthquakes, which are common, but experts have long expressed concerns about safety standards, particularly if a major quake hit close to a reactor.

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Maps: Reach of the Japanese Quake and Tsunami

 

 

 

Damage reports

Kamaishi A tsunami more than 13 feet high struck Kamaishi and Miyako at 3:21 pm local time.

Ofunato A tsunami more than 10 feet high was observed at Ofunato Port. More than 300 houses were washed away in Ofunato city.

Kesennuma NHK TV footage showed a large ship being swept away and ramming directly into a breakwater in 

 Kesennuma city.

Ishinomaki A tsunami over 10 feet high was observed in Ishinomaki city and television footage showed homes being washed away.

Sendai In Sendai, the closest major city to the epicenter, the government put the official death toll at more than 300. Some 70,000 people evacuated to shelters, according to Kyodo News.

Soma At 3:50 pm on Friday, a tsunami surging higher than 24 feet struck Soma Port. Many oceanside houses were underwater.

Oarai A 14-foot tsunami hit Oarai Port at about 4:52 pm on Friday.

Tokyo Power has been cut to four million homes in and around Tokyo and several fires were seen blazing across the city. Downtown buildings shook violently during the quake.

Ichihara A large fire erupted at the Cosmo oil refinery and burned out of control with 100-foot high flames.

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Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives

From seawalls that line stretches of Japan’s coastline, to skyscrapers that sway to absorb earthquakes, to building codes that are among the world’s most rigorous, no country may be better prepared to withstand earthquakes than Japan. 

 Had any other populous country suffered the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, tens of thousands of people might already be counted among the dead. So far, Japan’s death toll is in the hundreds, although it is certain to rise.
Over the years, Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis. The Japanese, who regularly experience smaller earthquakes and have lived through major ones, know how to react to quakes and tsunamis because of regular drills — unlike Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast.

Communities along Japan’s coastline, especially in areas that have been hit by tsunamis in the past, tend to be the best prepared. Local authorities can usually contact residents directly through warning systems set up in each home; footpaths and other escape routes leading to higher ground tend to be clearly marked.

In the country that gave the world the word tsunami, Japan, especially in the 1980’s and 1990’s, built concrete seawalls in many communities, some as high as 40 feet. In addition, some coastal towns have set up networks of sensors that can sound alarms in every residence and automatically closed floodgates when an earthquake strikes to prevent waves from surging up rivers. Ports are sometimes equipped with raised platforms.

Critics of the seawalls, however, say they are eyesores and bad for the environment. The seawalls, they say, can instill a false sense of security among coastal residents and discourage them from participating in regular evacuation drills. Moreover, by blocking residents’ view of the ocean, the seawalls reduce peoples’ ability to understand the sea by observing wave patterns, critics say.
According to the national broadcaster NHK, waves from Friday’s tsunami spilled over some seawalls in the affected areas. But it was too soon to say whether other seawalls or regular evacuation drills — or a combination of the two — prevented casualty figures from climbing higher.

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Devastation as Tsunami Crashes Into Japan

 TOKYO — An 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Japan on Friday, the strongest ever recorded in the country and one of the largest anywhere in the last century. The quake churned up a devastating tsunami that swept over cities and farmland in the northern part of the country and set off warnings as far away as the West Coast of the United States and South America. 

 Japanese police officials said that more than 200 bodies were found in Sendai, a port city in the northeastern part of the country and the closest major city to the epicenter, and the government put the official death toll at more than 300. But with many people still missing there and elsewhere, the death toll is expected to rise. A senior Japanese official said foreign countries had offered to help and Japan was prepared to seek overseas assistance.

The government evacuated thousands of residents in a two-mile radius around a nuclear plant about 170 miles northeast of Tokyo and declared a state of emergency after a backup generator failed, compromising the cooling system. So far, the chief government spokesman, Yukio Edano, said no radiation leaks had been detected. But the government announced it would begin releasing some slightly radioactive vapor to reduce pressure at the plant. One person died at a nuclear plant, according to Bloomberg News.

The earthquake and tsunami struck in deadly tandem, unleashing scenes of horror throughout northern Japan. First came the roar and rumble of the earthquake shaking skyscrapers, toppling furniture and buckling highways. Then walls of water rushed onto shore, whisking away cars and carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields and highways.
“I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life,” said Toshiaki Takahashi, 49, an official in the Sendai City office. “I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking, and getting stronger.”

Train service was shut down across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo, and air travel was severely disrupted. Cellphone service and landlines were down in the affected areas.
Television images showed waves of more than 12 feet roaring inland in Japan. The floodwaters, thick with floating debris shoved inland, pushed aside heavy trucks as if they were toys. The spectacle was all the more remarkable for being carried live on television, even as the waves engulfed flat farmland that offered no resistance. The tsunami could be seen scooping up every vessel in the ocean off Sendai, and churning everything inland. The gigantic wave swept up a ship carrying more than 100 people, Kyodo News reported.

Vasily Titov, director of the Center for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the center of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. "It’s not very much time. In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis. But it’s still not enough time.”
Complicating the issue, he added, is that the flat terrain in the area would have made it difficult for people to reach higher, and thus safer, ground. "There are not many places they could go," he said.

NHK television showed footage of a huge fire sweeping across Kesennuma, a city of more than 70,000 people in the northeast. Whole blocks appear to be ablaze. NHK also showed aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof. The runway was partially submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks.
Even in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, the quake struck hard. William M. Tsutsui, a professor of Japanese business and economic history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was getting off a bus in front of a hotel in Tokyo, where he was traveling with a business delegation, when the ground began to shake. “What was scariest was to look up at the skyscrapers all around,” he said. “They were swaying like trees in the breeze.”

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the quake and tsunami caused major damage across wide areas. 
The United States Geological Survey said the quake was the most severe worldwide since an 8.8 quake off the coast of Chile a little more than a year ago that killed more than 400. It was less powerful than the 9.1-magnitude quake that struck off Northern Sumatra in late 2004. That quake spawned a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.  

The survey said that Friday’s quake was centered off the coast of Honshu, the most populous of the Japanese islands, at a point about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo and a depth of about 17 miles below the earth’s surface.
The quake occurred at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time, and was so powerful that buildings in central Tokyo, designed to withstand major earthquakes, swayed.
“This tremor was unlike any I’ve experienced previously, and I’ve lived here for eight years,” said Matt Alt, an American writer and translator living in Tokyo. “It was a sustained rolling that made it impossible to stand, almost like vertigo.”
Japanese media reported that there had been more than 70 aftershocks in the hours after the quake. Some of them were of magnitude 6.0 or greater, strong enough to do significant damage on their own.
 
President Obama said the United States “stands ready to help” Japan deal with the aftermath. "Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to the people of Japan,” he said in a statement. He later spoke with Mr. Kan and offered assistance.
American military airfields in Japan began accepting civilian flights diverted from airports that suffered damage, American officials said early Friday.
A spokesman for the American 7th Fleet in Japan said that Naval Air Field Atsugi had received several commercial passenger planes that could not land at Narita. Officials said that Yokota Air Base also received civilian flights. In addition, three American warships in southeast Asia will be ordered out to sea to reposition themselves in case they are directed to provide assistance, according to a 7th Fleet spokesman.

Officials around the Pacific warned residents of coastal areas to prepare for a possible tsunami, but the initial reports were of minimal to no damage in the first places that the wave reached. Relatively small tsunami waves were reported in Halmahera, Indonesia, but did little harm. Russia, China and Indonesia canceled their warnings after a few hours.
Gauges at Midway Island in the Pacific registered a wave amplitude of about five feet, according to Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
On Hawaii, where the tsunami hit at midmorning East Coast time on Friday, initial wave heights were about four feet above normal sea level, said Paul Huang, a seismologist with the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska. Often, though, wave heights increase over time, with the second or third being the highest, he said. The center had predicted wave heights of six feet.

Television images showed survivors in a home surrounded by water, waving white sheets from the upper floors of buildings. News reports said the earthquake had forced the Tokyo subways to empty while airports were closed. Many residents set off on epic journeys home, walking for miles across a vast metropolitan area. In a video posted on YouTube, rumbles shook a supermarket as shopkeepers rushed to steady toppling wares and the classical music soundtrack played on.
Initial television coverage from coastal areas showed very few people actually in the water. The initial impact of the wave seemed to have been enormous, tipping two huge cargo vessels on their sides at one port and tearing others from their moorings.
Smaller vessels, including what looked like commercial fishing trawlers, were carried inland, smashing into the superstructure of bridges as the waters surged. Public broadcaster NHK reported that a large ship swept away by the tsunami rammed directly into a breakwater in Kesennuma city in Miyagi prefecture. Video footage also showed buildings on fire in the Odaiba district of Tokyo, The Associated Press reported.

A second major earthquake of 7.4 magnitude was reported as aftershocks shook the region. Japanese media reported mobile phone networks were not working.
Power blackouts were affecting about 2 million residents around Tokyo alone, the government said. Cell phone service was severely affected across central and northern Japan as residents rushed to call friends and relatives as aftershocks struck.

The quake occurred in what is called a subduction zone, where one of the Earth’s tectonic plates is sliding beneath another. In this case, the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the North American plate at a rate of about 3 inches a year. The earthquake occurred at a depth of about 15 miles, which while relatively shallow by global standards is about normal for quakes in this zone, said Emily So, an engineer with the United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.
Ms. So said that according to her agency’s calculations, the quake was of magnitude 8.9. It had been preceded by what seismologists call foreshocks — smaller quakes in the same area. The largest of these was a magnitude 7.2 quake two days before, centered about 25 miles south of the spot where the earthquake struck Friday.

In a subduction quake that occurs underwater, as this one did, the sudden movement of a portion of one of the plates can displace enormous amounts of water, triggering a tsunami. As the tsunami waves approach shallow coastal areas, they tend to increase in height.
The devastation often comes from a succession of waves, with the first few being relatively small. The waves can propagate across oceans at speeds of 500 miles an hour or greater. With Friday’s quake occurring only about 80 miles offshore, people in the closest coastal areas would not have had much time to evacuate.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was briefed on the disaster during a trip to Brussels. Geoffrey Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said there were no reports of damage to American military facilities or naval vessels.

The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong and the Straits Times in Singapore slumped after news of the quake, ending about 1.6 percent and 1 percent down, respectively.

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