Japan hit again, power knocked out in 3 million homes
Hayden Cooper reported this story on Friday April 8, 2011
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MARK COLVIN: As if the main Japanese island of Honshu didn't have enough to deal with, another 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit today.
A few people died and more were injured in the aftershock, but it was also another huge psychological setback for the hundreds of thousands already displaced by the original massive quake.
The aftershock also took a number of nuclear reactor plants off line.
I asked Hayden Cooper in Tokyo about today's quake.
HAYDEN COOPER: Yes, it was a large one. Just before midnight last night when it struck, the shaking here in Tokyo at least went for something like a minute but the worst of it was up near Sendai, off the coast of Sendai, about 60 kilometres. It gave the buildings up there quite a decent shake and actually killed a few people as well.
Three people died in this earthquake, something like 100, or up to 130 people were injured. So this in fact was the biggest aftershock if you can call it that since the earthquake and tsunami struck four weeks ago today.
MARK COLVIN: It's just extraordinary to think about those people who've lived through the big earthquake and then a series of aftershocks and then this should come when already many of their homes have been just blown away.
HAYDEN COOPER: Yes they have. There's still something like 160,000 people living in evacuation centres right across the north of the country. The big problem now, after this latest earthquake, is that it has absolutely devastated some of the power supply systems right across the north of Honshu.
So there are now something like three million households which lost power after last night's earthquake. So it's quite a staggering figure and the race is on now to try and restore some of the power but the last figure I saw was to suggest that still something like 2.6 million are without electricity.
MARK COLVIN: And it can't have done a lot of good for the people who are still battling the nuclear crisis at Fukushima.
HAYDEN COOPER: No, it can't have at all and not only there but several other nuclear power plants across the north of Japan were affected by the earthquake last night. For example, there's a reprocessing plant in our Aomori Prefecture. It lost power after the earthquake but managed to keep its cooling systems running on basically an emergency diesel backup.
The same thing happened at another plant; Higashidori, but it too kept going on an emergency power system. And Onagawa as well in Miyagi Prefecture, it lost some of its grid power as well. So look in all of those cases the authorities say that there's not a major threat, that there hasn't been any significant change in radiation readings but there are some reports of some water leakages, particularly at Onagawa as a result of the earthquake. But again, they seem fairly confident that it's not going to cause any major problems.
MARK COLVIN: And speaking of water leakages, that's been the one good bit of news in the last couple of days, that they have managed to stop the major leak at Fukushima. Any other good news?
HAYDEN COOPER: They plugged that but there's still since then been trying to get nitrogen into reactor one. Now they say that that is going as well as it can be expected but it's still part of an ongoing effort.
They might have to do the same to reactors two and three at Fukushima Daiichi and all the while they're still pumping water into all three of them and they're still, this is in the area of bad news, they're still discharging radioactive water into the ocean, although they maintain that it is relatively low levels of radiation.
MARK COLVIN: And the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation now classify Fukushima as the second worst nuclear accident in history, only topped by Chernobyl. But I don't think this is really dented the enthusiasm of Tepco, the company that runs Fukushima.
HAYDEN COOPER: It seems to be quite an extraordinary report that's come out suggesting that even in the past couple of weeks, Tepco has been lobbying to build another two reactors at Fukushima which seems pretty hard to believe given the way a report like that might go down in Fukushima itself.
But this report suggests that even last Thursday, Tepco had submitted plans to the Government in Tokyo for another two reactors to be built at Fukushima. One can only imagine that it's not an idea that the locals around there would be too pleased with and I daresay the Government might not agree to it either.
MARK COLVIN: Well it certainly does macabre but I suppose the one thing that it does underline is that with all these nuclear plants offline, Japan still has a big power problem, doesn't it?
HAYDEN COOPER: It does. There's a whole lot of them offline. The several that I mentioned earlier which were under threat from last night's earthquake were already in shutdown mode. So when you consider that that's two or three nuclear reactors, then there's Fukushima and several others which weren't really under threat last night.
They're all offline, all of this is leading to a summer coming up which could be extraordinarily difficult for people in Japan and people in Tokyo and in fact the Government today has been saying that it wants some targets set for electricity cutbacks, that it's telling big business that it wants it to cut its electricity use by a quarter, smaller businesses by 20 per cent and even householders by 15 to 20 per cent.
So these power shortages are going to be around for a long time.
MARK COLVIN: Hayden Cooper in Tokyo. And in diplomatic news China's foreign ministry tonight expressed concern over Japan's move to discharge waste water from the crippled Fukushima plant.
