Japan reached out Friday to the U.S. for help in reining in the crisis at its dangerously overheated nuclear complex as the country raised the severity of the accident on-hand.
Japan's nuclear safety agency has raised the rating of the country's nuclear accident from 4 to 5 on a 7-level international scale.
The hallmarks of a level 5 emergency are severe damage to a reactor core, release of large quantities of radiation with a high probability of "significant" public exposure or several deaths from radiation. The alert level applied to reactors No.1, No. 2 and No. 3 at the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
The scale defines a level 4 incident as having local consequences, while a level 5 incident can bring wider consequences.
The U.N.'s atomic energy chief said Friday that the disaster is a race against the clock that demands global cooperation said IAEA chief Yukiya Amano. The official plans to brief his agency's 35-nation board on Monday on the nuclear crisis in Japan after returning from Tokyo.
At the stricken complex, military fire trucks again sprayed the troubled reactor units for a second day, with tons of water arcing over the facility in desperate attempts to prevent the fuel from overheating and spewing dangerous levels of radiation.
"The whole world, not just Japan, is depending on them," Tokyo office worker Norie Igarashi, 44, said of the emergency teams working amid heightened radiation levels at the complex on the northeastern coast.
Last week's 9.0 quake and tsunami set off the nuclear problems by knocking out power to cooling systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant on the northeast coast. Since then, four of the troubled plant's six reactor units have seen fires, explosions or partial meltdowns.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/18/japan-reaches-race-clock-avert-nuclear-disaster
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