Tokyo: An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.3 struck northeastern Japan’s Fukushima on Tuesday, a weather agency said.
The quake registered lower five on the Japanese seismic scale of seven in northeastern Fukushima prefecture, infomrmed the Japan Meteorological Agency. The epicentre of the quake was at a latitude of 37.3 degrees north and a longitude of 141.6 degrees east and occurred at depth of 60km, said the agency.
The temblor was centred in offshore of northeastern Fukushima prefecture which borders the Pacific Ocean and is to the northeast of the nation’s capital city of Tokyo.
All Japan’s nuclear power plants on the coast threatened by the tsunami are shut down in the wake of the March 2011 disaster, which knocked out Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, spilling radiation into the air and sea. A spokeswoman for Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco, said the cooling system for a storage pool for spent nuclear fuel at the reactor at its Fukushima Daini Plant had been halted.
No other damage from the quake has been confirmed at any of its power plants, although there have been blackouts in some areas, the spokeswoman said.
Japanese Minister for Disaster Management Jun Matsumoto told reporters about three hours after the quake that there had been no reports of significant injuries so far.
Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the world’s most seismically active areas. Japan accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater. The March 11, 2011, quake was magnitude 9, the strongest quake in Japan on record. The massive tsunami triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl a quarter of a century earlier.
