“Everyone is going out of the country today I think,” said Gunta Brunner, a 25-year-old creative director from Argentina. “With the radiation, it’s like you cannot escape and you can’t see it.”

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON”

Japanese media have became more critical of Kan’s handling of the disaster and criticized the government and nuclear plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) for its failure to provide enough information on the incident.

Kan himself lambasted the operator for taking so long to inform his office about one of the blasts, demanding to know “what the hell is going on?,” Kyodo reported.

Kyodo said Kan had ordered TEPCO not to pull employees out of the plant.

“The TV reported an explosion. But nothing was said to the premier’s office for about an hour,” a Kyodo reporter quoted Kan telling power company executives.

Lam Ching-wan, a chemical pathologist at the University of Hong Kong, said the blasts could expose the population to longer-term exposure to radiation, which can raise the risk of thyroid and bone cancers and leukemia. Children and fetuses are especially vulnerable, he said.

“Very acute radiation, like that which happened in Chernobyl and to the Japanese workers at the nuclear power station, is unlikely for the population,” he said.

There have been a total of four explosions at the plant since it was damaged in last Friday’s massive quake and tsunami. The most recent were blasts at reactors No. 2 and No. 4.

Concerns now center on damage to a part of the No. 4 reactor’s core known as the suppression pool, which helps cool and trap the majority of cesium, iodine and strontium in its water.

Authorities had previously been trying to prevent meltdowns in the complex’s nuclear reactors by flooding the chambers with sea water to cool them down.

Murray Jennex, a professor at San Diego State University in California, said the crisis in Japan - the only nation to have suffered a nuclear attack - was worse than the Three Mile Island disaster of 1979.

“But you’re nowhere near a Chernobyl ... Chernobyl there was no impediment to release, it just blew everything out into the atmosphere,” he said. “You’ve still got a big chunk of the containment there holding most of it in.”

VILLAGES AND TOWNS WIPED OFF THE MAP

The full extent of the destruction from last Friday’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that followed it was still becoming clear, as rescuers combed through the region north of Tokyo where officials say at least 10,000 people were killed.

Whole villages and towns have been wiped off the map by Friday’s wall of water, triggering an international humanitarian effort of epic proportions.