Residents in a village near the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have been told by authorities not to drink tap water after high levels of radioactive iodine were detected.
Japan’s health ministry said 965 becquerels per kg of radioactive iodine was found in water which was sampled on Sunday in Iitatemura, which is 40km from the Fukushima No 1 plant.
Abnormal but much lower levels of radioactive iodine had already been found in the water supply in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures.
It is more than three times the level the government considers advising people to limit the intake of water.
‘There is no immediate effect on health if it is taken temporarily,’ health ministry official Shogo Misawa said of tap water in Iitatemura.
‘But as a precaution, we are advising people in the village through the prefectural office to refrain from drinking it.’
The prefecture of Fukushima is preparing to provide about 4,000 people in the village with bottled water, according to reports.
21,000 dead or missing
The toll of dead or missing from Japan's worst natural disaster in nearly a century has neared 21,000.
Police have said they believe more than 15,000 people had been killed in Miyagi prefecture alone.
Japan restored power to a crippled nuclear reactor today in its race to avert disaster at a plant wrecked by an earthquake and tsunami that struck nine days ago.
Around 300 engineers have been battling inside the danger zone to salvage the six-reactor Fukushima plant in the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years ago.
‘I think the situation is improving step by step,’ Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama told a news conference.
The unprecedented crisis will cost the world's third largest economy as much as $200bn and require Japan's biggest reconstruction push since post-World War Two.
Progress made at Fukushima plant
Encouragingly for Japanese transfixed on work at the Fukushima complex, the most critical reactor - No 3, which contains highly toxic plutonium - stabilised after fire trucks doused it for hours with hundreds of tonnes of water.
Work also advanced on bringing power back to water pumps used to cool overheating nuclear fuel, and temperatures at spent fuel pools in reactors No 5 and 6 were returning to normal.
Technicians attached a power cable to Nos 1, 2, 5 and 6 reactors, hoping to restore electricity later in the day prior to an attempt to switch the pumps on.
They aim to reach No 4 tomorrow or Tuesday.
If successful, that could be a turning point in a crisis rated as bad as the Unites States' 1979 Three Mile Island incident.
If not, drastic measures may be required such as burying the plant in sand and concrete, as happened at Chernobyl in 1986, though experts warn that could take many months and the fuel had to be cooled first.
On the negative side, evidence has begun emerging of radiation leaks from the plant, including into food and water.
Facing criticism of its early handling of the situation, TEPCO's president issued a public apology for ‘causing such great concern and nuisance’.
Even after restoring power, the company faces a tricky task reactivating the cooling pumps, with parts of the system probably damaged from the quake or subsequent explosions.
Miracle rescue in Miyagi prefecture
Meanwhile, an 80-year-old woman and 16-year-old youth were found alive today under the rubble of the Japanese city of Ishinomaki, nine days after the disaster, NHK public TV said.
NHK quoted police in Miyagi prefecture as saying the two had responded to shouts from a police rescue team. They were weak but conscious.
An official at Ishinomaki's Red Cross hospital said the two had been carried into the hospital and were getting treatment.
Yesterday, Kyodo news agency and the military reported the 'miracle rescue' of a young man pulled from the rubble of his home, only to find out that he had been in an evacuation centre beforehand and just returned to his home.
