17/03 Japan Offers Little Response to U.S. Assessment

March
17, 2011
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

TOKYO — A day after the top American nuclear official portrayed the situation at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in graver terms than the government in Japan, United States’ most important Asian ally, Japanese officials attributed the diverging accounts on Thursday to a “delay” in sharing information.

But, in public at least, they offered no sharp rebuttals of the comments made by Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that there was little or no water left in a pool holding hundreds of spent fuel rods at Fukushima Daichi’s No. 4 reactor. He also said that resulting high radiations levels could “impact the ability to take corrective measures.”

Most Japanese citizens did not react to Mr. Jaczko’s comments, which presented a far bleaker assessment of the unfolding nuclear crisis, for the simple reason that they went nearly unreported in the Japanese news media.

“There was a slight delay conveying to the U.S. side the information about whether or not there is water,” the government spokesman, Yukio Edano, said about the No. 4 reactor. Mr. Edano was responding to a question asked by a Japanese journalist at a morning news conference — the single one that dealt with Mr. Jaczko’s comments.

But American officials in Japan appeared to continue to operate on the assumption that the danger level was higher than described by the Japanese. On Thursday evening, the United States Embassy in Tokyo offered space aboard chartered planes for dependents of embassy personnel to any American showing up at the two Tokyo area airports, Haneda and Narita. Perhaps because of what such a move implied about Japan’s own assessment of the potential for nuclear fallout, the embassy declined to provide basic details of the flights.

Karen Kelley, a spokeswoman for the embassy, said that embassy officials organizing the charter flights “prefer” not to say how many planes were leaving Japan, how many passengers were aboard or what their immediate destinations were.

American officials also continued to advise Americans to evacuate a radius of “50 miles” from the Fukushima plant, in contrast to Japanese directives that people within about 12 miles evacuate while those between 12 and 19 miles stay indoors. The difference could leave hundreds of thousands of Japanese exposed to potentially dangerous levels of radiation.

Japanese officials did not flatly deny Mr. Jaczko’s comments but hedged. Asked about the level of water in the No. 4 reactor, Yoshitaka Nagayama, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said: “Because we have been unable to go to the scene, we cannot confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4.”

The technical nature of the issue perhaps compounded the Japanese news media’s tendency to shield the government. Reporters who cover agencies and ministries are organized in press clubs that have cozy ties with officials and decide what to report — and what not to. The lack of attention received by Mr. Jaczko’s comments was consistent in the news media.

As a result, most residents here were far more concerned with the announcement that a major blackout was being planned to conserve electricity in the Tokyo area. Department stores in this city’s most famous shopping district, Ginza, remained dark as shoppers stayed home. Restaurants closed early as many companies continued to tell their employees to stay home or those working rushed into lightly crowded commuter trains to beat the blackout.



More in Asia Pacific (4 of 53 articles)
Easy Fixes at Reactors in Long Run Are Elusive
Read More »

Close