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The cooling system of the third reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has stopped circulating water following a powerful 7.3 offshore earthquake. TEPCO said it managed to restart the system some 90 minutes after the failure.
The cooling system servicing the Unit 3 spent fuel pool was not able to circulate water to cool the nuclear fuel because of a broken pump, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency.
The temperature in the pool went up to 29 degrees Celsius. It takes up to seven days for temperatures to rise to 65 degrees Celsius, which is the upper operational limit, Japan's national nuclear agency said.
At such a pace, the cooling system failure posed no "immediate danger," although the agency admitted "gradual" rise in temperatures.
The exact cause of the cooling system stoppage is currently unknown. However, the system might have been "shaken" during the earthquake, according to nuclear agency officials, as reported by NHK. The station's storage pool currently contains 2,544 spent fuel rods. No cooling water leaks or any other "abnormalities" have been reported.
The first tsunami wave which hit the nuclear power plants was about one meter high, while the second was "not very high," according to TEPCO. There has been no "major physical damage" to the nuclear power plants, NHK reported.
One of the best points of reference for an earthquake this size is the 9.0 earthquake that hit Tohoku, Japan in 2011. It's believed that an 8.0 or higher is likely to hit California every 2,500 years. Maiclaire Bolton, a seismologist and senior product manager for CoreLogic, emphasized, "We are talking about very rare earthquakes here."As many as 3.5 million homes could be damaged in an 8.3-magnitude quake along a roughly 500-mile portion of the fault—compared with 1.6 million homes damaged if only the northern part of the fault were to break, or 2.3 million if the southern piece ruptured.
The damage to homes alone could total $289 billion, compared with a previous range of $137 billion on the southern portion of the fault and $161 billion in the north, according to the CoreLogic analysis.
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