accident at a Japanese nuclear fuel facility

[Thomas M Lashley <lashleyt@dteenergy.com>]

Didn't see this one in Sandy's new reports.
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TOKYO (Reuters) - An accident at a Japanese nuclear fuel facility Thursday
exposed three workers to radiation and prompted authorities to evacuate the
vicinity while advising other residents to stay inside, officials and media
said.

Government officials said there may have been a ''criticality incident'' at
a uranium processing plant in the village of Tokaimura in Ibaraki
Prefecture, about 87 miles northeast of Tokyo.

Criticality is the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes
self-sustaining, similar to what occurs inside a nuclear reactor.

Toshio Okazaki, vice minister at the Science and Technology Agency, told a
news conference that the cause of the accident was being investigated.

But he said that a ``criticality incident'' may have caused the accident,
which temporarily caused radiation levels to race up 4,000 times higher than
normal.

The government of Ibaraki, where Tokai is located, confirmed media reports
that radiation levels later returned to near-normal levels after the
incident, which took place at around 10:35 a.m.

But another Ibaraki official later said that radiation levels were still
above normal at mid-afternoon, although he said he could not give specific
figures.

Officials at Tokaimura advised some 50 households living within 380 yards of
the processing plant to evacuate and others were advised in radio broadcasts
to stay home.

The Kyodo news agency said one person was heavily exposed to radiation in
what would be Japan's worst injury from a nuclear accident.

All three workers were taken to hospital and later transferred by helicopter
to a specialized hospital in Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo, officials said.

``It's still too early to know exactly what their condition is,'' a hospital
official said shortly after the victims had arrived.

Two were said to be suffering from symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea,
according to media reports.

Makoto Ujihara, an executive at JCO Ltd, the private company which operates
the plant, told a news conference that the workers had seen a blue flash --
said by experts to be a sign of a ``criticality incident'' -- and then began
to feel ill.

The village of Tokaimura, with a population of around 33,802 people, is home
to 15 nuclear-related facilities and was the scene of Japan's worst nuclear
plant accident in which 35 workers suffered radiation contamination in 1997.

In that accident at a nuclear reprocessing plant, a fire that caused
radiation to escape was not extinguished properly and caused an explosion
hours later.

Some radiation leaked from the plant but at levels far below that which
would pose a hazard to the public, officials said at the time.

More recently, cooling water with a radiation level of 11,500 times the
maximum permissible limit leaked from a commercial nuclear reactor on the
Sea of Japan coast in July this year.

Nobody was injured in that incident.

Japan has 51 commercial nuclear power reactors that provide one-third of the
country's electricity.



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