New blasts, fire at nuclear plant in disaster-hit Japan

Japan's nuclear crisis escalated today as two more blasts and a fire rocked a quake-stricken atomic power plant, sending radiation up to dangerous levels.

Radiation around the Fukushima No.1 plant on the eastern coast had "risen considerably", Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, and his chief spokesman announced the level was now high enough to endanger human health.

In Tokyo, some 250 kilometres to the southwest, authorities also said that higher than normal radiation levels had been detected in the capital, the world's biggest urban area, but not at harmful levels.

Kan warned people living up to 10 kilometres beyond a 20 km exclusion zone around the nuclear plant to stay indoors.

The fire, which was later reportedly extinguished, was burning in the plant's number-four reactor, he said, meaning that four out of six reactors at the facility are now in trouble.