The ongoing crisis at damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been slowly spinning out of control and developing into "a slow-moving nightmare," as one analyst called the situation. There have been fires, leaks of hazardous levels of radiation, and mass evacuations since catastrophic earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11th.
There have been also very little information and string of confusing announcements by the company that operates the Fukushima plant: Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the fourth largest electric power company in the world.
"We don't know even the fundamentals of what's happening, what's wrong, what isn't working. We're all guessing," said John Price, an Australian-based nuclear safety expert.
The company released the details of an explosion at the reactor No. 4 more than 20 hours after the incident. It prompted critics to suggest that TEPCO was attempting to cover up news of the worsening situation.
TEPCO faced more criticism after Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, admitted that he’d been forced to learn about current developments at the damaged plant from television. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, demanded that the company be more transparent and provide more "timely and detailed information" about the ongoing situation.
The power company has also been questioned whether they put in place adequate safety measures in light of its alarming past of cover-ups and falsification of safety reports. In 2002, TEPCO was accused of falsifying 29 cases and covering up reports of the cracks on the core of 13 nuclear reactors at three plants. In heavy fallout from the nuclear scandal, the president, vice president and chairman of the company quit, along with two advisers.
Furthermore, precautions and evacuation plans implanted to protect people from harmful radiation weren’t universally embraced. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo was recommending that U.S. citizens who live within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the plant evacuate or take shelter indoors, U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos recommended in a statement Wednesday that U.S. citizens who live within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Fukushima plant should evacuate or stay indoors. In comparison, Japanese officials recommended that anyone within 19 miles (30 kilometers) should take shelter indoors and people were evacuated from within 12-miles (20 kilometers) radius of the plant.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that "Their standards are different from ours based on how far you should evacuate."
In the latest attempts to prevent the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japanese self-defense force’s helicopters were deployed on Thursday to dump water on the No. 3 and 4 reactors. Engineers are also getting ready to restore the power supply using the power lines from outside in order to re-establish failed cooling system.
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