Setbacks mounted in Japan’s nuclear crisis today, with nearby seawater showing the highest radiation levels yet and the president of the wrecked plant being taken to hospital with stress.

Japan has promised to overhaul nuclear safety standards once it regains control of the wrecked Fukushima complex, admitting its current safeguards were not enough.

Highly toxic plutonium is seeping from the damaged nuclear power plant in Japan’s tsunami disaster zone into the soil outside, officials said.

Mounting problems, including incorrect radiation figures and a shortage of storage tanks, have stymied emergency workers as they tried to nudge Japan’s stricken nuclear complex back from the edge of disaster.

US naval barges loaded with freshwater sped toward Japan’s overheated nuclear plant today to help workers scrambling to stem a worrying rise in radioactivity and remove dangerously contaminated water from the facility.

Black smoke has been seen emerging from Unit 3 of the crippled nuclear plant in north-eastern Japan, prompting a new evacuation of the complex, according to officials.

Power cables have been connected to all six reactors at Japan's damaged nuclear plant, a significant step in bringing the complex under control.

A pool for storing spent fuel at Japan's crippled nuclear plant is heating up, with temperatures around boiling point, an official said today.

Japan's nuclear experts admitted today that the Fukushima reactor disaster was worse than anything they ever imagined could have happened.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency says the operator of the country’s troubled nuclear complex repeatedly failed to make crucial inspections of equipment in the weeks before it was crippled by the earthquake and tsunami.

Two of the six reactor units at Japan’s crippled, leaking nuclear plant are now safely under control after their fuel storage pools cooled down, officials said today.

THE catastrophe that has engulfed Japan could also make or break its prime minister, Naoto Kan.

The fuel rods in one of Japan’s damaged nuclear reactors have been temporarily fully exposed from their coolant, raising the risk of overheating and a meltdown.

AS Japan awoke today to count the potential thousands of people killed by an apocalyptic earthquake and tsunami, engineers were fighting against time to prevent a Chernobyl-type nuclear disaster.

Failure to follow procedure was to blame for the latest leak from a nuclear power station damaged in this week’s earthquake in north-western Japan, a top government official said today.