Toyota Motor Corp. (7203)
gained the most in more than two years in Tokyo trading as carmakers and suppliers began to reopen factories closed after Japan’s strongest earthquake on record.
The world’s biggest carmaker rose 9.1 percent to 3,345 yen, the biggest daily gain since December 2008, after plunging 15 percent over the two previous days. Nissan Motor Co. recovered 6.2 percent and Honda Motor Co. regained 3.9 percent.
Toyota, which halted all plants in Japan after the March 11 quake through today and canceled overtime at U.S. factories, will reopen seven plants in Aichi prefecture tomorrow morning, said Keisuke Kirimoto, a spokesman in Tokyo.
Mitsubishi Motors Corp. (7211)
and tiremaker
Bridgestone Corp. (5108)
reopened plants today that were shut after the magnitude-9.0 quake off the coast of northern
Japan
, which may have killed as many as 10,000 people >>>>
Radioactive Risk to Tokyo Limited Even at Worst, U.K. Says
March 17 (Bloomberg) -- The risks to human health from damage at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi atomic plant are limited to the area around the facility, according to the U.K.’s Chief Scientific Officer John Beddington.
“The 20 kilometer exclusion zone that the Japanese have actually imposed is sensible and proportionate,” Beddington said, according to a transcript of a conference call yesterday.
The worst case scenario would result in an explosion that could send radioactive material about 1,600 feet in the air, he said.
Workers at the Fukushima facility, damaged after the March 11 earthquake, are struggling to keep the plant’s reactors cool and to control pressure inside the containment vessels.
If they fail to do so, pressure would build up inside the reactors and cause the core to melt, Beddington said. As it melts, the material will fall and react with the concrete and other materials on the floor, he said on a call with the British Embassy in Tokyo.
“In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion,” he said. “Now, that’s really serious, but it’s serious again for the local area. It’s not serious for elsewhere.”
Assuming that weather patterns drive radioactive material toward Tokyo, there would be “absolutely no issue” for human health, he said.
Even following the disaster at Chernobyl, there were no radiation-related problems outside the 30 kilometer (18.6 mile) exclusion zone, the scientist said.
The U.K. embassy today recommended nationals currently in Tokyo and to the north of Tokyo to consider leaving the area because of the threat from the Fukushima nuclear facility, as well as disruptions to the supply of goods, transport, communication, power and infrastructure, the British embassy said in a statement on its website.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kari Lundgren in London at klundgren2@bloomberg.net Mehul Srivastava in New Delhi at msrivastava6@bloomberg.net .
Engineers at Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant have managed to lay a cable to reactor 2, the UN's nuclear watchdog reports.
Restoring power should enable engineers to restart the pumps which send coolant over the reactor.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12779512
For a while now it has appeared that delivering electrical power to Fukushima Daiichi power station offered the best hope of stabilising things.
Provided that the station's electrical systems are intact and its pumps are still functional, it should become possible to pump water back into the fuel storage ponds in reactor buildings 3 and 4, and to improve the flow into the damaged reactors themselves.
But it is also possible that the earthquake, tsunami, fires and explosions have knocked out some of this equipment.
Provided power can be restored across the complex, it appears possible that Fukushima Daiichi could be back under control within a few days.
Engineers had worked through the night to reconnect the power cable, which Tepco had aimed to complete yesterday. Power may be restored to all six reactors by tomorrow, Hikaru Kuroda, chief of Tepco’s nuclear facility management department, said in Tokyo earlier today.
“We need to see the pumps working and once the cooling systems are resumed then the worst is over,” Robin Grimes, a professor of materials physics at Imperial University in
London
, said in a telephone interview. “We need to see the temperatures continuing to go down and the radiation going down.”
“If I owned Japanese stocks, I would certainly not be selling them because of the events of the past 10 days or so,” said Buffett, speaking to reporters in the South Korean city of Daegu, where he arrived yesterday to attend a ceremony for a new factory being built by TaeguTec Ltd. “Something out of the blue like this, an extraordinary event, really creates a buying opportunity.”
WB is a good guy, i never got a chance to read he talk down the mkt. Why?
I leave that to you, for most here say they are value invester. So is WB
There will come a time when all value got no meaning.
We have yet to see the worse.
Can you guess what will be the next fallout to knock out the mkt ard the globe?
no Japan, No ME..your turn to guess. Your turn now. I may be wrong.
But so far for me, i have been mostly wrong on the right side.
But does not means you cant ride the rally. BUt dont talk value. no meaning for the near future. JMO
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