Nuclear countries glean lessons from Japan's disaster

30 km (19 miles) from the reactor to stay indoors. The Bank of Japan pumped eight trillion yen ($102 billion) into the jittery financial system after a record 15 trillion yen injection on Monday.

As bulldozers begin clearing an emergency route to the Fukushima nuclear plant to allow access for fire trucks, the country’s reclusive Emperor Akihito delivered a rare address to the Japanese people, offering his concern about the scale of the crisis. In his televised Wednesday statement Akihito said he was deeply worried and asked people to treat each other with “compassion” during a crisis he called “unprecedented in scale.”

Coming in a week of mass evacuations and dwindling food on store shelves, the emperor’s address reminded older Japanese of the end of the Second World War when a recorded message from Akihito’s father had marked the surrender.

Though the sense of helplessness is hardly as profound as it was then, the impact of last week’s disaster is already profound. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995, Japan refused offers of help from the United States. This time around, Tokyo welcomed offers of help early. On the day Akihito made his address, the government even said it might have to seek direct U.S. military intervention in the crisis.

The government now planned to use helicopters to drop water onto the reactors in an attempt to cool them. Authorities had also brought in troops to help pump water at the stricken plant as part of their last-ditch efforts to prevent a meltdown.

Washington had offered help almost immediately after the quake. The U.S. Navy, though, had also pulled back from the Japan coastline in an apparent effort to avoid any possible nuclear contamination.

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Chairman Gregory Jaczko questioned Japan’s order to evacuate citizens within a 20-km radius from the plant. Jaczko said U.S. citizens would be told to evacuate to an 80-km radius.

With gasoline reserves at the site dwindling, scientists initially decided to drive to the West Gate, stop, and then monitor radiation levels there.

Now the levels were so high that those sent in didn’t stop. With only a single data point — and a lot of noise — it became harder to draw conclusions on what was happening at the plant.

“Readings can change with the weather and be affected by radiation in dust and other materials that accumulate,” Tetsuo Ohumura of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told reporters. “We’ll have to see