Several embassies advise staff, citizens to leave affected areas after third explosion at nuclear plant causes radiation leak; Japanese PM urges warns citizens to stay inside or risk radiation sickness
Panic swept Tokyo on Tuesday after a rise in radioactive levels around an earthquake-hit nuclear power plant north of the city, causing some residents to leave the capital and others to stock up on food and supplies.
Several embassies advised staff and citizens to leave affected areas, tourists cut short vacations and multinational companies either urged staff to leave or said they were considering plans to move outside Tokyo.
The families of a number of Israeli diplomats stationed at the embassy in Tokyo returned home on Monday, although Foreign Ministry sources said their return was not connected to fears of a nuclear crisis. In a statement, the ministry said the families had been brought home to give them some "temporary rest and relaxation" from having to contend with the aftershocks that continue to rock Japan.
Early on Tuesday, a third explosion in four days rocked the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in northeast Japan, the country's nuclear safety agency said. According to reports, radiation is spewing from the damaged reactors.
The blast at Dai-ichi Unit 2 followed two hydrogen explosions at the plant - the latest on Monday - as authorities struggle to prevent the catastrophic release of radiation in the area devastated by a tsunami.
The nuclear core of Unit 2 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in northeast Japan was undamaged, said a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Shigekazu Omukai.
The agency suspects the explosion early Tuesday may have damaged the reactor's suppression chamber, a water-filled tube at the bottom of the container that surrounds the nuclear core, said another agency spokesman, Shinji Kinjo.
Radiation levels measured at the front gate of the Dai-ichi plant spiked following Tuesday's explosion, Kinjo said.
The prime minister has warned residents to stay inside or risk getting radiation sickness.
In one sign of the panic that has seemed to take over the country, Don Quixote, a multistory, 24-hour general store in Tokyo's Roppongi district, was sold out of radios, torches, candles, fuel cans and sleeping bags on Tuesday as a Reuters reporter visited the shop.
U.S. banking giant Citigroup said it was keeping workers constantly informed of the situation, but that there were no current evacuation orders from headquarters, said a spokesman, adding that the bank was closely following guidance by the U.S. embassy, which has not urged nationals to leave Tokyo.
Some international journalists covering the disaster from the worst-hit region around the northeastern city of Sendai, devastated by Friday's mammoth earthquake and tsunami, were pulling out.
The Tokyo office of Michael Page International, a British recruitment agency, was closing for the week. "I am leaving for Singapore tomorrow and will work from our Singapore office," said one employee.
Kyodo News said "minute levels" of radiation have been detected in Tokyo and radiation levels in Saitama, near Tokyo, were 40 times normal levels -- not enough to cause human damage but enough to stoke panic in the bustling, ultra-modern and hyper-efficient metropolis of about 12 million people.
Winds over the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power complex, about 240 km north of Tokyo, are blowing slowly in a southwesterly direction that includes Tokyo, but will shift westerly later on Tuesday, a weather official said.
The wind is moving at a speed of about two to three meters per second, said the official with the Japan Meteorological Agency who is based in Fukushima Prefecture, the location of three troubled reactors.
The French embassy in Tokyo warned in an 0100 GMT advisory that a low level of radioactive wind could reach Tokyo in about 10 hours, advising its citizens to leave the city.
The German embassy issued a "general advisory" urging all Germans and their relatives to register on a "crisis list" and to consider leaving Japan, especially those with families.
Some urged an expansion of the 30 km evacuation zone surrounding the plant.
"The evacuation zone may not be enough," said a Hiroshima-based Japanese scientist who treats nuclear radiation victims.
"The main lasting effect will probably be in milk produce and the radiation in milk, because the cows go around like vacuum cleaners and absorb the radiation spread over a wide range and those particles are easily transferred into the milk, which is in turn easily absorbed by babies and children."
The number of stranded passengers swelled at Tokyo's main international airport at Narita as airlines cut flights.
"The airport appears crowded due to the stranded passengers, but we have not experienced a surge in passenger traffic," said a Narita official. "Of the 534 flights scheduled yesterday, 27 were cancelled and five were delayed for the next day. So traffic is not rising."
China's national airline cancelled flights to Tokyo on Tuesday after reports that low-level radioactive wind from a damaged nuclear reactor could reach the city later in the day, but other carriers they were still monitoring the situation.
Air China did not give a reason for the cancellations of flights from Beijing and Shanghai to Tokyo. Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Air New Zealand and several other airlines said they were monitoring the situation but had not cancelled any services to Tokyo.
The fear at the Fukushima plant is of a major radiation leak after the quake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems.
The worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 has drawn criticism that authorities were ill-prepared, and revived debate in many countries about the safety of atomic power.
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