Explosion at Japan nuclear plant

A second explosion has hit a Japanese nuclear plant that was damaged in Friday's earthquake, but officials said the reactor core was still intact.

A huge column of smoke billowed from Fukushima Daiichi's reactor 3, two days after a blast hit reactor 1.
The latest explosion, said to have been caused by a hydrogen build-up, injured 11 people, one of them seriously.

Soon afterwards, the government said a third reactor at the plant had lost its cooling system.
Water levels were now falling at reactor 2, which is to be doused with sea water, said government spokesman Yukio Edano.

A similar cooling system breakdown preceded the explosions at reactors 1 and 3.

Evacuations

Japanese officials are playing down any health risk, but the US said it had moved one of its aircraft carriers from the area after detecting low-level radiation 100 miles (160km) offshore.
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We headed towards where the tsunami hit land, close to the little village of Higashiro. We had to pick our way through a sea of mud.

What should have been a road was covered in broken branches, a squashed tractor and lots of electricity cables that had been brought down. The destruction goes on and on.

The seashore was in the distance behind a row of trees. Here the waves toppled houses; they lie at crazy angles. Trees have been smashed into the buildings. A motorcycle lies twisted and bent.

Inside the houses, the furniture has been turned to matchsticks, possessions tossed everywhere, and on a few walls are portraits with the faces of those who once lived here, now stained by the waters which filled everything.

'Everything is gone'

Technicians have been battling to cool three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant since Friday, when the quake and tsunami combined to knock out the cooling system.

In other developments:
Two thousand bodies have been found on the shores of Miyagi prefecture, Japanese media are reporting

The government announced it was pumping 15 trillion yen ($182bn; £113bn) into the economy to prop up the markets - which slumped on opening

Prime Minister Naoto Kan postponed planned rolling powercuts, saying they may not be needed if householders could conserve energy

The BBC's Rachel Harvey in the port town of Minami Sanriku says everything has been flattened until about 2km inland.

It looks unlikely that many survivors will be found, she adds.

Japanese police have so far confirmed 1,597 deaths, but the final toll is expected to be much higher.
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from the area around Fukushima Daiichi plant.

At least 22 people are now said to be undergoing treatment for radiation exposure.

Powerful aftershocks
The government said radiation levels were below legal limits after Monday's explosion. Tokyo Electric Power, which operates the plant, said the reactor's containment vessel had resisted the blast.

Residents of the coastal city of Sendai are continuing the search for survivors amid the devastation

Experts say a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl in the 1980s is highly unlikely because the reactors are built to a much higher standard and have much more rigorous safety measures.

Earlier, the prime minister said the situation at the nuclear plant was alarming, and the earthquake had thrown Japan into "the most severe crisis since World War II".

The government advised people not to go to work or school on Monday because the transport network would not be able to cope with demand.

The capital Tokyo is also still experiencing regular aftershocks, amid warnings that another powerful earthquake is likely to strike very soon.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of relief workers, soldiers and police have been deployed to the disaster zone.
Preliminary estimates put repair costs from the earthquake and tsunami in the tens of billions of dollars, a huge blow for the Japanese economy that - while the world's third largest - has been ailing for two decades