Hydrogen may have caused Japan atom blast: Nuclear industry

A nuclear industry body official said on Saturday he believed a blast at a Japanese atomic power plant was due to hydrogen igniting, adding it may not necessarily have caused radiation leakage.

"It is obviously an hydrogen explosion ... due to hydrogen igniting," Ian Hore-Lacy, communications director at the World Nuclear Association, a London-based industry body, told Reuters after reports of the explosion in Japan.

"If the hydrogen has ignited, then it is gone, it doesn''t pose any further threat."

"As far as we know there is no particular danger from radiation leaks. There may be, but we don't know that. There is no reason to suppose that there must be because of that," Hore-Lacy said.

Japan's government said radiation had leaked from stricken 40-year-old Daiichi 1 reactor plant in Fukushima, north of Tokyo, after an explosion blew the roof off the facility in the wake of a 8.9-magnitude earthquake, raising fears of a meltdown.