Japan, Japan Earthquake | featured news

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

Australia advised its citizens in Japan on Wednesday to consider leaving Tokyo and earthquake-affected areas, joining a growing number of governments and businesses telling their people it may be safer elsewhere.

Japan's devastating earthquake and deepening nuclear crisis could result in losses of up to $200 billion for the world's third largest economy but the global impact remains hard to gauge five days after a massive tsunami battered the northeast coast.

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according to reports from CNN, Reuters and the AP tonight, the last workers at the Fukashima-Daiichi reactors have been withdrawn from the scene, halting efforts to continue cooling partially melted fuel rods with ocean water.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.

What a bone-headed move. There’s nothing wrong with the 7 nuclear plants that German Chancellor Angela Merkel decreed would be shut down. Just last fall Germany decided to extend the lives of these plants, which provide roughly 10% of Germany’s electricity. With solar and wind entirely unscalable, how’s Germany going to make up the electric deficit? Either by ramping up the use of fossil-fuel burning plants (and importing more natural gas from Russia) or importing power from its neighbors–like nuke-friendly France.

Stocks plunged Tuesday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down almost 300 points at the opening, as the nuclear crisis in Japan intensified following a deadly earthquake and tsunami....

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.

While the tech world may have been watching the lines outside of Apple stores and gauging response to the launch of the next generation Apple tablet, most of the eyes of the world were on Japan.