The UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says the nuclear plant closest to the epicentre of the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, is?“remarkably undamaged.''
According to a report delivered on Friday at the UN Headquarters in New York, the world body nuclear watchdog, the earthquake that struck Japan resulted in a devastating tsunami and radiation leakage at another facility. ?
The report was by an expert team of the agency following its two-week mission to the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station.
The Onagawa Nuclear Power Station is 120 kilometres north of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that was severely damaged during the seismic event, when the building housing the plant exploded.
Three of its nuclear reactors suffered a meltdown in what was reported to be the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
A year later, a 19-kilometre exclusion zone still surrounds the disaster site.
“The structural elements of the Nuclear Power Station (NPS) were remarkably undamaged given the magnitude of ground motion experienced and the duration and size of this great earthquake,” the report said.?
It noted that the IAEA mission's objective was to observe how safety structures, systems and components responded to the heavy shaking, which was not possible to study at Fukushima Daiichi because of the damage.
He said that Onagawa, facing the Pacific Ocean on Japan's north-east coast, experienced very high levels of ground shaking among the strongest of any plant affected by the earthquake.
It added that some flooding from the tsunami that followed was able to shut down safely. (NAN)