WAVE OF DEATH

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.

Japanese nuclear safety agency officials have said radiation levels inside a damaged power plant had surged to 1,000 times normal.

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake caused a cooling failure in a reactor at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, 400km north of Tokyo.