While any immediate fears over the earthquake and tsunami threat have calmed, many people in Japan are still in shock over the morning’s events.
The Guardian is reporting that Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports: residents along the coast are still badly shaken. “It was huge and lasted so long,” Akemi Anzai, from the city of Minamisoma which lies north of the Fukushima plant, said of the quake.
“The tsunami siren warning can be heard from the coastline,” she told AFP. “The ground is still shaking. I’m so scared. But my concern is rather the situation at the nuclear plant.” Many evacuees took to Twitter to express their fears.
“I’m at a cultural center where I evacuated during the previous disaster [in 2011],” one person tweeted in Japanese. “This reminds me of that.”
Earlier today, shortly after the news about the earthquake broke here on the East Coast of the U.S., there were stories coming out on social media that a reactor pool at the Fukushima power plant was down, having stopped operating after the 6:00 a.m. earthquake.
Actually, the factual story concerns the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant and its reactor number three spent fuel pool pump. It stopped operating at 6.10 a.m. local time as a result of the quake. A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) says operation resumed at 7.49 a.m. and the plant is reported to be safe and “intact.”
The Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, also known as Fukushima II NPP is located on a 150 hectare (370-acre) site in the town of Naraha and Tomioka in the Futaba District of Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power Plant is located about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) to the north of the Daini plant.
TEPCO officials say they are not sure why the spent fuel pool pump stopped operating, but insist there is no immediate danger and it would take a week for the water temperature in the pool to reach dangerous levels. The Fukushima Daini power plant has been shut down since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Decommissioning work at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, destroyed in the 2011 quake, has been temporarily suspended. There are only two nuclear power plants in operation in Japan, and both of them are located in the southwest of the country. But even when a nuclear power plant is shut down, the cooling systems need to continue operating to keep the spent fuel rods cool.
According to Reuters, Tohoku Electric Power Company said its Onagawa nuclear plant was not damaged, while the Kyodo news agency reported the Tokai Daini nuclear plant in Ibaraki prefecture is reporting there were no damages.