Mars 2011: Kärnkraftverket i Fukushima - utbruten och sammanfogad tråd

10.27am: Water levels have fallen far enough to partly expose fuel rods at the No 2 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi, according to the Jiji news agency.


10.02am: The No 2 reactor at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant has lost all its cooling capacity, according to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

NHK World is reporting that Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, has notified the agency of an emergency at the No 2 reactor.

10.50am: The Guardian's science correspondent, Ian Sample, writes that the first report from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency this morning described a rise in radioactivity around the Fukushima nuclear power station when compared to Sunday's levels.

The highest level, at 680 microSieverts per hour, was measured earlier on Monday in a direction north-northwest of the plant, the wind direction at the time. To put that level in perspective, the typical dose we receive from background radiation is 2000 microSieverts a year. So spending an hour at the monitoring post leads to an exposure equivalent to around four months due to background.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency report that at 1.10am local time on Monday, engineers had to stop pumping water into reactors one and three at Fukushima because seawater pits ran dry. Injection of water in the reactor 3 - the one that uses a plutonium mix fuel - restarted at 3.20am. They give no further details of the situation at reactor 1.