MOSCOW (MRC) -- Japan began assessing damage and restoring power after a magnitude-7.3 earthquake struck off Fukushima late Saturday, leaving about 150 people injured and temporarily cutting power to almost a million households, reported Bloomberg.
No deaths were reported, according to public broadcaster NHK, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at a press conference on Sunday that no incidents were reported from reactors. Six coal- and gas-fired power units, with a combined capacity of about 3.6 gigawatts, are offline due to the quake without any timeline for restart, according to the Japan Electric Power Exchange.
The powerful tremor, which was felt in Tokyo, occurred just one month before the 10-year anniversary of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that led to a meltdown at three reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant and left about 19,000 people dead or missing. The latest tremor was an aftershock of the 2011 quake, according to Japan’s national meteorologist.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said there was a minor overflow of water from the pool that stores used atomic fuel at the Fukushima nuclear plants, but no uncontrolled radiation was detected, NHK reported. Suga said Monday 12 people sustained serious injuries from the quake and 141 were slightly injured.
Mitsui Chemicals Inc. said its Ichihara plant, which includes a naphtha cracker, in Chiba was shut due to a power outage. It would take about 10 days to restart the plant.
ENEOS Holdings Inc. also said it temporarily suspended the Sendai refinery, while some units at the Negishi refinery were halted.
Idemitsu Kosan Co. said the sole crude distillation unit and some secondary units at the Chiba refinery were halted due to power outage following the quake. Some secondary units at the Keihin refinery operated by Idemitsu’s unit Toa Oil Co. were also shut.
As MRC informed earlier, Mitsui Chemicals operated its naphtha cracker normally following a maintenance turnaround. The company resumed operations at the cracker on July 19, 2020. The cracker was shut for maintenance on June 11, 2020. Located in Osaka, Japan, the cracker has an ethylene capacity of 500,000 mt/year and a propylene capacity of 280,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
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