Residents near a Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear reactor were ordered to evacuate because of a possible radiation leak as Japan's strongest earthquake in a century shut power plants and oil refineries.

About 1,800 residents living within 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 1 reactor were ordered to evacuate, said Ryohei Shiomi, spokesman at the Emergency Information Center of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Residents within 10 kilometers were told to stay indoors.

Firefighters continued to battle a blaze at Cosmo Oil Co.'s refinery, 40 kilometers east of Tokyo, said Seiichi Aso, a spokesman at the local fire department. The blaze started at the 220,000 barrel-a-day plant's storage tanks, Cosmo Oil spokesman Yusuke Kaneda said. JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corp. said it shut its refineries in Sendai, Kashima, and Negishi.

FLASH: Contact has been lost with four trains along Japan's coastal area: report

'This is the sixth largest earthquake that's ever been recorded since seismographic records began in 1900.

It's certainly the largest earthquake to have affected Japan in the last century and considerably larger than anything else in living memory in Japan.

The largest previously was the 1923 Kanto earthquake, the one that caused so much damage in Tokyo, that was only 7.9. That's 30 times less powerful than this one.'

Seismologists at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, have just revised their calculations regarding the magnitude of today's quake. They now say it was magnitude 9.0. Already one of the top 10 recorded earthquakes in history, the revision suggests the quake was even more powerful than first thought.

Harold Tobin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told New Scientist that this figure will probably change again. This is typical in the hours after a large seismic event, as more information becomes available.

Earlier today, it was suggested that the tremor may have occurred along a splay fault - a branch off the main megathrust fault which runs through this area of the Japan trench. If so, that could mean the fault was previously unknown to geologists.

Splay faults tend to break at steeper angles than megathrust quakes, making them highly likely to lead to a large uplift of the seafloor that produces damaging tsunamis such as the one that crashed ashore in Sendai and the Honshu coast earlier today.

But the new set of calculations indicate that the giant quake ruptured at an angle of 14 degrees below horizontal. Such a shallow slip suggests the earthquake did in fact occur along the main megathrust fault.

Foreign Office: "We advise against all non-essential travel to Tokyo and the North-East of Japan." #japan #earthquake

In one of the worst-hit residential areas, people buried under rubble could be heard calling out "help" and "when are we going to be rescued", Kyodo news agency reported.

From seawalls that line stretches of Japan's coastline, to skyscrapers that sway to absorb earthquakes, to building codes that are among the world's most rigorous, no country may be better prepared to withstand earthquakes than Japan.

Had any other populous country suffered the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, tens of thousands of people might already be counted among the dead. So far, Japan's death toll is in the hundreds, although it is certain to rise.

Over the years, Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis. The Japanese, who regularly experience smaller earthquakes and have lived through major ones, know how to react to quakes and tsunamis because of regular drills -- unlike Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast.

Not all US military personnel in Japan have been accounted for, the Pentagon has just confirmed.

An emergency line has been set up for non-Japanese speakers, on 050 5814 7230 and 03 5366 6001. English, Chinese, Korean are available 24 hours a day. Portuguese and Spanish between 9am-8pm.

Reports are coming in of thousands of people trapped in Tokyo's Disneyland following the devastating 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on Friday.

According to media reports, the quake and subsequent tsunami has forced the Tokyo Disney Resort to shut its gates with thousands of tourists still inside the park. The parking lot has been flooded, making it impossible for people to leave.

According to TheDisneyBlog, 69,000 guests were evacuated to safe areas within the park and provided with supplies and temporary shelter. They are waiting for instructions on how to get home.

2310. More from the Tokyo Electric Power Company: It says the ability to control pressure in some of the reactors at Fukushima-Daini has been lost. Pressure is stable inside the reactors, but rising in the containment vessels, a company spokesman says.

2252. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has said the cooling systems of three reactors at second nuclear power plant, Fukushima-Daini, are malfunctioning, according to the Kyodo news agency. The plant is 11km (7 miles) to the south of Fukushima-Daiichi, where the cooling system one of its reactors is not working and pressure is rising.

2239. Japanese nuclear safety officials have said the problems at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant represent "no immediate health hazard" to people living nearby. Some 45,000 people living within a 10km (6-mile) radius of the plant were told to evacuate as radiation levels rose to 1,000 times above normal in one reactor.

2217. The Associated Press is also now citing Japanese nuclear safety agency officials as saying that radiation levels inside one of the reators at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant have surged to 1,000 times their normal levels after the cooling system failed. Pressure inside the reactor has risen to 1.5 times the level considered normal.

2156. The Onagawa nuclear power plant also suffered a fire in a non-nuclear turbine building, which took eight hours to extinguish, according to the World Nuclear Association. A minor fire burned in a non-nuclear service building of the Fukushima-Daini plant, but this was extinguished within two hours, the WNA added.

2153. The pressure inside one of the six Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant has built up because the cooling system was damaged by the earthquake. The heat produced by the nuclear reaction inside the core still needs to be dissipated even after a shutdown. If the outage in the cooling system persists, eventually radiation could leak out into the environment, and, in the worst case, could cause a reactor meltdown, experts say.

2149. The Kyodo news agency is now citing a safety panel as saying that the radiation level inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant is 1,000 times higher than normal.

2140. Meanwhile, officials in Washington have said the US military did not provide any coolant to a nuclear plant in Japan. Earlier, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said US Air Force "assets" had been used to do so.

2139. Radiation levels at the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant are continuing to rise. The Jiji Press news agency says the levels are eight times above normal. Its report also cites a ministry official as saying there is a "possibility of a radioactive leak".

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday's powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns.

A single reactor in northeastern Japan had been the focus of much of the concern in the initial hours after the 8.9 magnitude quake, but the government declared new states of emergency at four other reactors in the area Saturday morning.

The earthquake knocked out power at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and because a backup generator failed, the cooling system was unable to supply water to cool the 460-megawatt No. 1 reactor. Although a backup cooling system is being used, Japan's nuclear safety agency said pressure inside the reactor had risen to 1.5 times the level considered normal.

Authorities said radiation levels had jumped 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1 and were measured at eight times normal outside the plant. They expanded an earlier evacuation zone more than threefold, from 3 to 10 kilometers (2 miles to 6.2 miles). Some 3,000 people had been urged to leave their homes in the first announcement.

The government declared a state of emergency, its first ever at a nuclear plant. And plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. warned of power shortages and an "extremely challenging situation in power supply for a while."

The government has also just ordered the evacuation of a three kilometre radius around Fukushima Daini plant - following the previous evacuation order of a 10km radius around Fukushima Daiichi.

However, a chap of the Red Cross at Dutch television had the audacity to suggest the disaster was at par with the Indonesian quake of 2004. He's only right when it comes to the character of the earth quake, as I posted earlier, but on the scale of human catastrophe I feel such a statement is just another howler of Doom, considering we talk about Japan one of the world's richest and best prepared nations to withstand earthquakes.

But I can do sensationalist Doom too, and whats more I can do it a lot better too. The people in the news and the press that have begun correlating this quake to "The Big One" are not even wrong. Yes, the quake ranks in scale up to an historic record, one of the world's biggest ever recorded. But it it not the Big One. The earthquake's epicenter was situated  almost 100 kms off the shores of Honshu. Try to imagine what happens when a quake of this magnitude strikes below Tokyo - that city "waiting to die" as it sits on top of the convergence of three tectonic plates. It might not in happen our time, the earth is patient. But it will happen, one day. And no swaying skyscraper has ever been tested for an event like that, except in theory.

This is a catastrophe, no doubt about it, but it should also worsen the anxiety that the people living in Tokyo have about earthquakes and their fear for the Big One.

They do say that timing is everything--via a press release sent out today by House Republicans:

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers today introduced a Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the federal government at current rates for three weeks -until April 8 - while cutting $6 billion in spending.  [...]

-$99 million - NOAA - Operations, Research, and Facilities
-$18 million - NOAA - Procurement Acquisition and Construction

Yeah, that NOAA. The ones tasked with monitoring and warning Americans about natural disasters ... like tsunamis.

CNN just aired footage w/ translation from NHK which basically showed that Minamisoma, pop 71k or so, was gone.

http://theenergycollective.com/nathantemple/53384/how-shutdown-and-core-cooling-japanese-reactors-li kely-functions

The cooling system failed at three reactors of the quake-hit Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant Saturday, the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

The company, which has already scrambled to deal with radiation leaks at its Fukushima No. 1 plant, notified the industry ministry that the failsafe system at the No. 2 plant stopped functioning as the temperature of coolant water has topped 100 C.

• Immediate halt to new construction, for a start.
  
• Next step : abandonment of all reactor designs that rely on any form of active cooling.
  
• Meanwhile : China continues apace with their Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. If I have understood correctly, they are inherently safe from the point of view of passive cooling and the possibility of meltdown.
  
• In twenty years, when the rest of the world starts looking at nuclear again, China will have a complete lock on the technology.

The cooling system failed at three reactors of the quake-hit Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant Saturday, the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

The company, which has already scrambled to deal with radiation leaks at its Fukushima No. 1 plant, notified the industry ministry that the failsafe system at the No. 2 plant stopped functioning as the temperature of coolant water has topped 100 C.

Toyota says to suspend operations at all 12 factories in Japan on Monday

Japan's Fuji TV has run a screen caption saying that as many as 10,000 people are missing in the town of Minamisanriku in Miyagi prefecture.

Lufthansa is scanning aircraft that return to Germany from Japan for radioactivity - but has not detected any

More business news: European shares have fallen to a three-month low following Japan's disaster.

One Tocqueville Finance fund manager said:

Anything related to the nuclear sector is under pressure as traders bet on tougher regulation. At the same time the renewable sector is in favour as the other side of the trade.

As temperatures plummet, millions of people are spending a fourth night without foods, water or heating.

Overwhelmed shelters are housing 550,000 people along Japan's east coast after the earthquake and tsunami killed at least 10,000 people. Kyodo news agency reports that authorities have lost contact with a further 30,000 citizens.

In Ishinomaki, Patrick Fuller, of the International Federation of the Red Cross, says:

It is the elderly who have been hit the hardest.

The tsunami engulfed half the town and many lie shivering uncontrollably under blankets. They are suffering from hypothermia having been stranded in their homes without water or electricity.

Snow is expected within the next few days.