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Japan Quake Causes Havoc At Nuke Plant

A total of 50 cases of malfunctioning have been discovered at a nuclear power plant hit by an earthquake in northern Japan, a news report said Tuesday.

Cases included fires, water and oil leaks at the plant triggered by Monday's magnitude-6.6 quake, and pipes knocked out of place, Kyodo News agency reported, quoting the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co.

TEPCO officials could not immediately confirm the report.

The Kariwa nuclear power plant at Kashiwazaki city, near the epicenter, is the world's largest in terms of power output capacity.

With nine people dead, over a thousand others injured, hundreds of collapsed buildings and damaged roads and train tracks, Japan got a new jolt from Monday's quake as officials who first said the nuclear power plant had no radioactive leak admitted 12 hours later that it did.

About 100 drums containing low-level nuclear waste fell over at the plant during Monday's 6.8-magnitude quake and were found a day later, some with their lids open, said Masahide Ichikawa, an official with the local government in Niigata prefecture.

The power company is working to determine whether any hazardous material had spilled, said Ichikawa, citing a report by the company.

With highways ripped up and bridges destroyed, officials struggled to get emergency supplies to the quake region, where nearly 13,000 people have crowded into evacuation centers amid worries of mudslides and more aftershocks.

Some 53,000 homes in the quake zone are without water, 35,000 are without gas as of early Tuesday, and over 25,000 households are without power.

Further complicating the cleanup during what is Japan's rainy season, forecasters are predicting heavy rain, flooding and lightning in the area.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said Tuesday that officials are still assessing the damage. "The most important thing is to take necessary measures quickly and respond to the needs of the victims," he said.

Many of the injured suffered broken bones, cuts and bruises. "I got so dizzy that I could barely stand up," said Kazuaki Kitagami, a worker at a 7-Eleven convenience store in Kashiwazaki, the hardest-hit city. "The jolt came violently from just below the ground."

The Japanese Meteorological Agency put the magnitude at 6.8, while the U.S. Geological Survey said it was 6.6.

In Kashiwazaki, the quake reduced older buildings to piles of lumber. On Tuesday morning, officials said a total of 342 houses had been destroyed and another 469 were damaged.

"The damage is more than we had imagined," said Kashiwazaki Mayor Hiroshi Aida. "We want to recover water first as soon as possible so more people can return home."

Nine people in their 70s and 80s - six women and three men - died, most of them crushed by collapsing buildings, the Kyodo news agency said early Tuesday. One person was still missing, officials said.

The area was plagued by aftershocks, but there were no immediate reports of additional damage or casualties. Near midnight, Japan's Meteorological Agency said a 6.6-magnitude quake hit off the west coast, shaking wide areas of Japan, but it was unrelated to the Niigata quake to the north and there were no immediate reports of damage.

The quake, centered off the coast of Niigata in northwest Japan but felt as far as 160 miles away in Tokyo, triggered a fire in an electrical transformer and caused a leak of radioactive water at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, a sprawling complex that is the world's largest in terms of electricity output.

The quake hit just after 10 in the morning on Monday but it wasn't until Monday night that officials, who had said there was no radioactive leak, admitted that there had been one but insisted there is no danger from the leak.

The revelation that there was a leak - of radioactive water - raised new questions about the safety of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors, which supply 30 percent of the electricity in this quake-prone nation, and which have had a long string of accidents and cover-ups.

About 315 gallons of slightly radioactive water apparently spilled from a tank at one of the sprawling power complex's seven reactors and entered a pipe that flushed it into the sea, said Jun Oshima, an executive at Tokyo Electric Power Co. He said it was not clear whether the tank was damaged or the water simply spilled out.

Officials said there was no "significant change" in the seawater near the plant, which is about 160 miles northwest of Tokyo. "The radioactivity is one-billionth of the legal limit," Oshima said of the leaked water.

Eliot Brenner, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, said the agency told Japan's government it was ready to provide assistance if needed but had not received any request for help.

Brenner said he didn't have details about the incident. But a U.S. nuclear industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was a Japanese affair, said the transformer fire and water leak occurred in systems linked to different reactors.

First word of trouble at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa power plant was a fire that broke out at an electrical transformer. All the reactors were either already shut down or automatically switched off by the quake. The blaze was reported quelled by early afternoon, and the power company announced there was no damage to the reactor and no release of radioactivity.

But in the evening, the company released a statement revealing the leak of radioactive water, saying it had taken all day to confirm details of the accident. But the delay raised suspicions among environmentalists, who oppose the government's plan to build more reactors.

"The leak itself doesn't sound significant as of yet, but the fact that it went unreported is a concern," said Michael Mariotte at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Maryland-based networking center for environmental activists. "When a company begins by denying a problem, it makes you wonder if there's another shoe to drop."

The accident comes as the government is discussing improving the earthquake resistance of such plants, said Aileen Mioko Smith of the Japan-based environmentalist group Green Action.

The fire indicated that some facilities at nuclear power plants, such as electrical transformers, were built to lower quake-resistance levels than other equipment, like reactor cores, she said.

"That's the Achilles' heel of nuclear power plants," said Mioko Smith, who pointed out that it took plant workers two hours to put out the transformer fire.

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Akira Amari told the power company early Tuesday not to resume plant operations before making a thorough safety check, Kyodo reported.

Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries.

In October 2004, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit Niigata, killing 40 people and damaging more than 6,000 homes. It was the deadliest to hit Japan since 1995, when a magnitude-7.2 quake killed 6,433 people in the western city of Kobe.

The last major quake to hit Tokyo killed some 142,000 people in 1923, and experts say the capital has a 90 percent chance of suffering a major quake in the next 50 years.

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