Open to the elements after its walls were blown away, this is the dried-up storage pool where overheating fuel rods are threatening a nuclear meltdown at Japan's stricken Fukushima power plant.
Visible in green within the shattered walls of Fukushima nuclear power plant, the storage pool is dried up, exposing nuclear fuel rods to the air. Photo: AP
Close-up pictures of the devastated No 4 reactor building show the gaping hole through which radiation is escaping into the atmosphere as the rods break down.
Last night, the UN's nuclear safety body said it was "too early to say" whether desperate attempts to cool them by spraying water into the building had been a success.
The Foreign Office issued an urgent statement advising any Britons within 50 miles of the plant to leave the area immediately, and arranged charter flights to get British citizens out of the country.
Radiation levels 20 miles from the plant – well outside Japan's official 12-mile evacuation zone – came close to double the safety limit normally allowed for nuclear workers.
Despite assurances that other countries were not at risk of harmful levels of radiation, growing alarm led to panic-buying of radiation-blocking drugs in places thousands of miles from Japan.
A week after the Fukushima Daiichi plant was crippled by the earthquake and tsunami, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the situation remained "very serious". Graham Andrew, the scientific and technical adviser at the UN safety body, said there had been "no significant worsening" of the situation, but the No 4 unit remained "a major safety concern".
Asked whether frantic attempts to cool the plant with sea water had been a success, he said: "I think it's too early to say that. It hasn't got worse, which is positive. But it's still possible that it could get worse.
"So I'd rather not speculate. I think we'd say it's reasonably stable compared to yesterday."
Photographs taken from an aircraft by an employee of the company which owns the power station showed for the first time the full extent of the damage to the reactor units, three of which suffered explosions following a failure of its cooling system.
In unit No 4, a whole wall is missing from the area where spent fuel rods are stored while they cool to a safe temperature.
Inside the building, a green-painted crane, which is normally used to move the fuel rods, caught the daylight flooding into the hall.
Beneath the crane, just out of shot, is the pool holding the fuel rods, which should contain water 45ft deep but which has now boiled dry.
Other pictures show the collapsed metal framework of another reactor unit's roof twisted beyond recognition. Workers who volunteered to risk their lives to save the plant from meltdown spent another day frantically trying to get water into the storage pool by every means possible.
Attempts to dump thousands of gallons of sea water from helicopters appeared to meet with little success, and efforts to use a water cannon had to be abandoned at one stage because radiation levels outside the plant became unacceptably high.
Scientists in Sweden said that radioactive particles from the plant, blown across the Pacific by prevailing winds, would reach the west coast of America today, leading to a slight increase in background radiation.
Lars-Erik De Geer, research director at the Swedish Defence Research Institute, said the radioactive particles would eventually reach Europe and the whole of the northern hemisphere.
He stressed that the increased radiation would not be harmful to human health in any way, but officials in the United States and Russia said they were stepping up their monitoring of background radiation.
Despite assurances from governments around the world that the crisis would not have health implications outside Japan, several countries reported panic-buying of potassium iodide tablets, which are taken to prevent the body absorbing radiation.
In China, supermarkets ran out of salt, which contains low levels of iodine, even though it would be useless in protecting against radiation, and pharmacists ran out of iodine supplements as far away as Bulgaria and the US. President Barack Obama made a live television statement to reassure Americans that they were safe, saying: "We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States."
At airports around the world, passengers from Japan were being checked for radiation as they disembarked last night.
France said it would fly 100 tons of boric acid, which helps absorb radiation, to Japan.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the Fukushima plant, offered a ray of hope when it said that it had managed to connect a temporary power line to reactor No 2, in the first stage of its efforts to restore electricity and start up the cooling system in the units.
A spokesman said: "If the restoration work is completed, we will be able to activate various electric pumps and pour water into reactors and pools for spent nuclear fuel."
Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, was due to arrive in Japan today for a first-hand briefing on the crisis.
The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami had reached 5,692, with another 9,522 people missing yesterday.
About 850,000 households in the north of Japan were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power Company said, and the government said that at least 1.5 million households lacked running water.
Asked whether frantic attempts to cool the plant with sea water had been a success, he said: "I think it's too early to say that. It hasn't got worse, which is positive. But it's still possible that it could get worse.
"So I'd rather not speculate. I think we'd say it's reasonably stable compared to yesterday."
Photographs taken from an aircraft by an employee of the company which owns the power station showed for the first time the full extent of the damage to the reactor units, three of which suffered explosions following a failure of its cooling system.
In unit No 4, a whole wall is missing from the area where spent fuel rods are stored while they cool to a safe temperature.
Inside the building, a green-painted crane, which is normally used to move the fuel rods, caught the daylight flooding into the hall.
Beneath the crane, just out of shot, is the pool holding the fuel rods, which should contain water 45ft deep but which has now boiled dry.
Other pictures show the collapsed metal framework of another reactor unit's roof twisted beyond recognition. Workers who volunteered to risk their lives to save the plant from meltdown spent another day frantically trying to get water into the storage pool by every means possible.
Attempts to dump thousands of gallons of sea water from helicopters appeared to meet with little success, and efforts to use a water cannon had to be abandoned at one stage because radiation levels outside the plant became unacceptably high.
Scientists in Sweden said that radioactive particles from the plant, blown across the Pacific by prevailing winds, would reach the west coast of America today, leading to a slight increase in background radiation.
Lars-Erik De Geer, research director at the Swedish Defence Research Institute, said the radioactive particles would eventually reach Europe and the whole of the northern hemisphere.
He stressed that the increased radiation would not be harmful to human health in any way, but officials in the United States and Russia said they were stepping up their monitoring of background radiation.
Despite assurances from governments around the world that the crisis would not have health implications outside Japan, several countries reported panic-buying of potassium iodide tablets, which are taken to prevent the body absorbing radiation.
In China, supermarkets ran out of salt, which contains low levels of iodine, even though it would be useless in protecting against radiation, and pharmacists ran out of iodine supplements as far away as Bulgaria and the US. President Barack Obama made a live television statement to reassure Americans that they were safe, saying: "We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States."
At airports around the world, passengers from Japan were being checked for radiation as they disembarked last night.
France said it would fly 100 tons of boric acid, which helps absorb radiation, to Japan.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the Fukushima plant, offered a ray of hope when it said that it had managed to connect a temporary power line to reactor No 2, in the first stage of its efforts to restore electricity and start up the cooling system in the units.
A spokesman said: "If the restoration work is completed, we will be able to activate various electric pumps and pour water into reactors and pools for spent nuclear fuel."
Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, was due to arrive in Japan today for a first-hand briefing on the crisis.
The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami had reached 5,692, with another 9,522 people missing yesterday.
About 850,000 households in the north of Japan were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power Company said, and the government said that at least 1.5 million households lacked running water.
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