Asia, Natural Disaster | featured news

A small band of experts is risking their lives to prevent a nuclear disaster at Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.

It seems too impossible to believe, but according to reports from CNN, Reuters and the AP tonight, the last workers at the Fukashima-Daiichi reactors have been withdrawn from the scene, halting efforts to continue cooling partially melted fuel rods with ocean water. Just a day earlier 750 more workers had been removed. Exhaustion, radiation exposure, hopelessness–we don’t yet know the reason for this latest move. Earlier in the day new fires, explosions and clouds of smoke or steam were spotted. Maybe the evacuation means that the worst of the danger is over (how else could they leave?) — but that doesn’t seem likely.

A magnitude 6.0 earthquake shook eastern Japan on Tuesday, one of the most powerful aftershocks to hit the country since Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami which killed at least 10,000 people, public broadcaster NHK said.

The last thing Japan needed was more bad news on its threatened nuclear reactors. But Monday and early today, that's just what this nation got.

These aerial photos show locations in Japan before and after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that struck on Friday, March 11.

A tide of bodies washed up along Japan's coastline, crematoriums were overwhelmed and rescue workers ran out of body bags as the nation faced the grim reality of its mounting humanitarian, economic and nuclear crisis Monday after a calamitous tsunami....

Last week's earthquake in Japan could lead to insured losses of nearly $35 billion, risk modeling company AIR Worldwide said, making it one of the most expensive catastrophes in history.

The massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake that shook Japan and triggered a powerful tsunami on Friday has had a profound effect on both the surrounding terrain and the planet as a whole. Dr. Daniel McNamara, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Huffington Post that the disaster left a gigantic rupture in the sea floor, 217-miles long and 50 miles wide.

The last-ditch move indicates that the backup cooling system in a second quake-damaged reactor has failed. Japanese officials say radiation levels at another reactor being pumped with seawater have fallen, but hydrogen gas is building in a third.

Fifteen members of China’s International search and Rescue Team took off for Japan Sunday morning to help its neighbor clean up from one of its biggest natural disasters in a generation, the Xinhua news agency reports.