Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 5

The fire at Reactor 4 is out at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, spent fuel rods may have caught fire and burned according to officials, and between that and the explosion at Reactor 2 yesterday, people aren't exactly sticking around in Tokyo.

Tokyo residents emptied store shelves of daily necessities and stocked up on gasoline as the risk of nuclear radiation leaks from a facility north of the Japanese capital escalated.

Seven & I Holdings Co., Japan’s biggest retailer, said its Ito-Yokado supermarkets are being emptied daily of necessities such as water, rice and batteries as soon as fresh supplies arrive. “Every day the stores provide a certain amount, but as soon as a shop opens, the products disappear,” Hirotake Henmi, a spokesman for Seven & I, said in a phone interview.

Workers today struggled to avert the risk of a meltdown at a crippled nuclear plant 135 miles north of Tokyo as Cabinet Chief Secretary Yukio Edano said radiation readings around the complex reached “a level that could harm people.” A blast and fire struck the Fukushima nuclear facility today, after two earlier explosions that followed the failure of cooling systems damaged by the March 11 earthquake, Japan’s strongest on record.

Masaru Sakamoto, a 49-year-old salesman for a food company in Tokyo, said he couldn’t buy gasoline over the weekend. “I went to more than 10 places on Saturday and Sunday and they were all sold out. Monday was no good, either.” He finally filled up his car at a Shell gas station in central Tokyo today.

People are not remaining calm.  They are leaving northern Japan.

At Haneda Airport, hundreds of young mothers lined up with children, boarding flights out of Tokyo.

"We are getting our of Tokyo and going to our home town because of the situation. For the time being we have bought a one way ticket and will wait and see what happens," said a Japanese woman with an eight-month-old baby and four-year-old son, who declined to be identified by name.

Tourists such as Christy Niver, of Egan, Minnesota, said they had enough. Her 10-year-old daughter, Lucy, was more emphatic. "I'm scared. I'm so scared I would rather be in the eye of a tornado," she said. "I want to leave."

Radiation levels have fallen some from the spike earlier today,  but confidence in the Japanese government has been all but lost and the threat of a nuclear meltdown continues to remain high as the situation continues to grow more dire.  Odds are almost assured that Reactor 2's containment system has been damaged and a meltdown scenario is imminent.

They have bought time, but that's all.