Tokyo, March 14: Japan faced a nuclear crisis on multiple fronts with two atomic reactors in partial meltdown and four others heating up as the failure of ageing plants forced the evacuation of 210,000 people from the area, The Daily Telegraph, London reported.
An exclusion zone of 12 miles was in place around the 40 year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex where engineers battled to prevent three reactors overheating after the tsunami exposed flaws in the plant's cooling system.
The Japanese government insisted only a small amount of radioactive material had been released. Facilities in Tokai, 75 miles north of Tokyo, and Onagawa, north of Fukushima, were also subject to alerts.
The plant, operated by the privately run Tokyo Electric Power Company, was one of the oldest supplying the grid, having been commissioned in 1971.Housing six reactors, only three were online at the time of the earthquake as the others were undergoing maintenance.
But officials were helpless to prevent the core of reactor number one overheating, causing an explosion in the outer building.A mass contamination screening programme was ordered for evacuees as questions were asked about the future of Japan's flawed nuclear industry.
With a lack of natural oil and gas reserves, Japan, which has a population of 127 million, has become heavily reliant on nuclear power.The reactors did not suffer substantial structural damage in the initial quake.
But what the engineers had not anticipated was the effect the resulting tsunami would have on vital power supplies at nuclear power plants positioned along the Pacific coastline.
Travelling at 60mph, the 30ft wave crippled back-up diesel generators, which were supposed to kick in and maintain the cooling systems in the event of a quake.
Fukushima's number one reactor was due to be decommissioned last month, but had its operating licence extended for another 10 years due to the demand for electricity. Officials insisted on Sunday night that the explosion had not breached the core so had not resulted in a major release of radioactive material.
But with the plant's other two reactors also struggling with rising temperatures, the Japanese government was forced to concede that further explosions and leaks were possible.
Officials flooded the reactors with seawater in a last-ditch attempt to prevent overheating. This will render the reactors unusable.Japan's nuclear industry, which began in the early 1960s, has had a chequered safety record.
In 1999, two people were killed when workers at the Tokaimura uranium processing facility caused an uncontrolled atomic reaction when they mixed the wrong amounts of fuel. Almost 500 people living near to the plant were exposed to abnormal levels of radiation.
In 2004, four workers were killed when an explosion in the cooling system caused superheated steam to escape.The Tokyo Electric Power Company has also been criticised.
In 2002, its chairman and four other executives were forced to resign after being accused of falsifying safety reports at the Fukushima plant.
Prof Walt Patterson, a nuclear energy expert at Chatham House, told Channel Four News that the problems faced at the Japanese plants had been "foreseen for many years". He said: "The design of the reactor is such that it is inherently susceptible to the kind of problems that are happening now."
