Japan ordered that emergency earthquake checks be carried out on all its nuclear facilities yesterday as experts gave warning that the country’s largest plant may be prone to further radioactive leaks.

The government order came after nuclear investigators revealed that more than 100 containers of radioactive remains of clothes, shoes and building materials at the country’s largest nuclear plant, in Kashiwazaki, were toppled by the massive earthquake on Monday.

Investigators were unable to sign off on the safety of the Kashiwazaki plant last night, with industry sources saying that the discovery of further leaks was still possible.

The incidents have sparked serious concerns over earthquake safety precautions and the future of Japan’s ageing nuclear industry. Many of the country’s 55 nuclear plants are not built to withstand a quake of Monday’s violence: it had a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale, while most plants are built to cope with only 6.5.

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A government panel debating whether to raise the earthquake re- sistance of Japan’s nuclear plants to withstand a 6.9 magnitude earthquake dissolved in confusion recently. A proposal to raise the quake-proofing above magnitude 7.1 was shelved because of the high costs.

The panel’s deliberations stalled after the angry resignation of a key member, Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a professor of Kobe University, who recently attacked government proposals as inadequate, simplistic and “not rooted in science”. He told The Times yesterday: “Unless Japan has a really severe \ accident, a full and proper safety review will never happen.”

Some of the toppled Kashiwazaki drums, which were kept in a large storage centre for about 23,000 containers of low-level radioactive waste, were found with their lids dislodged. They contained a variety of materials that had become radioactive through daily exposure in the plant and could not be disposed of in a conventional way.

Their discovery came amid mounting evidence of a slow response, bungling and a lack of adequate disaster planning by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The company was criticised yesterday by residents in Niigata for reacting slowly to a fire that broke out on Monday and which did not appear to be dealt with for at least two hours, despite widespread television coverage of the inferno.

The fire exposed corner-cutting on safety by Tepco, Aileen Mioko Smith, the director of Japan’s Green Action lobbying group, said. “Equipment at nuclear plants is built to different standards. The transformer that caught fire was just a regular-standard piece of equipment. These companies talk about quake resistance but yesterday’s incident raises concerns that there is barely a nuclear power plant in Japan that is not built near an active [geological] fault,” she said.

The discovery of the opened containers follows the admission by authorities in Niigata that a small quantity of radioactive coolant water was mistakenly allowed to leak from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant into the sea shortly after the earthquake.

In a statement that sent a chilling warning to nuclear facilities across Japan, the management of Kashi- wazaki admitted that the tremor had been far stronger than the quake- resistance level for which the plant equipment and facilities had been produced.

The nuclear issue added to a second day of misery for thousands of Niigata residents. The death toll from the earthquake reached nine overnight, while the number of injured surpassed 1,100.

More than 12,000 people were still sheltering in evacuation centres, while tens of thousands more were without water and electricity.

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