Dear colleagues,

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all international
colleagues for sending us the warm words and support after the
devastating earthquakes which hit the north eastern Japan on Friday
March 11th, and the subsequent crisis in the nuclear power plants in
Fukushima. This is a national disaster.

I was in a symposium of the Target Protein Research Program of the MEXT
(a national project on structural proteomics) in University of Tokyo at
the time. 400 to 500 people evacuated the Yasuda Lecture Hall and waited
outside for an hour. The University safety official announced that we
would soon be able to go back in to the building to resume the meeting,
but nobody believed that. Soon after that, we decided to cancel the
meeting in the halfway through, and the participants went home, or tried
to do so. By that time the traffic in Tokyo and around the country had
become a total mess. Without train services, no taxis found, many people
walked home 10 to 30 km, or had to stay in train stations or on the road
overnight. I myself also had to stay in Tokyo and spent 6 hours to get
back to Tsukuba from Tokyo the next day.

The Photon Factory is 60 km north of Tokyo, 200 km from the Fukushima
nuclear reactors. There have been no injuries both in the KEK Tsukuba
Campus (where the PF is located) and the J-PARC (a new spallation
neutron source in Tokai, on the coast) but many damages have been
observed. In Tsukuba, we still have very limited emergency power (up to
2 MW), no water, no gas. This makes it very difficult to assess the
extent of real damages. On very limited visual inspection, our five
protein crystallography beamlines have been spared of major damages, but
we need to wait until we turn on the components and bring in the beam.
The linear accelerator has seen some substantial damages: three RF
components moved by about 10 cm along the beam direction breaking the
vacuum, one Q magnet fell onto the floor, some ground water spills. PF
and PF-AR rings have seen less of damages: some fallen control racks,
but again we need to turn the system on before knowing the real damages.
Several components of VUV-SX bealines have been displaced. All these
need to be carefully checked and reinstalled before we can get back to
normal operation, which could be, at least, two to three months.

As many of you have seen on the TV, internet, and other news media, the
four nuclear reactors in Fukushima, 200 km away from KEK Tsukuba are all
in deep trouble. We are really scared by the potential meltdown of any
of these reactors. The information released from the Government and the
Company are rather limited. I guess they are trying not to scare people
but this makes us worry even more. The situation of the nuclear plant
has worsened every hour for the last several days, but I do hope that
they will contain the damage. At KEK, we are now measuring the radiation
level continuously, and so far the highest we have seen in Tsukuba is a
sharp rise to 1.1 microSv/h (not really a major health hazard at this
level) at 9AM this morning but then it went down to normal. People's
life around Tsukuba is also affected; gas (gasoline) is very scarce and
every gas station either has a long queue or closed after selling their
stock out. In supermarkets, drinking water, bread, rice, meat, etc. are
very hard to find. I have told my children that we are very lucky in
that all five of us are together in the house without any major damages,
and our extended families are also well, compared to the terrible
situation in northern Japan closer to the epicenters where people lost
their lives, houses or loved ones.

We will work together to survive this crisis and try to restore our
lives and the science in the coming months, and would very much
appreciate your continuous support in these difficult times. For
example, I would expect shortage of beamtime during the recovery of the
PF and our colleagues at SPring-8 will help us, but would like to ask
for your support in helping the Japanese protein crystallographers with
some beamtime. Thank you very much for reading this message thus far and,

faithfully,
Soichi

Soichi Wakatsuki, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Photon Factory and Structural Biology Research
Center
Associate Director, Institute of Materials Structure Science, KEK
1-1 Oho, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-0801, JAPAN
Tel & Fax: +81-29-864-5631
E-mail: [log in to unmask]