The video will start in 8 Cancel

The Daily Star's FREE newsletter is spectacular! Sign up today for the best stories straight to your inbox Sign up today! Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

The room in the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone controlled the power plant’s crippled third and fourth reactors.

Shockingly, it has radiation levels more than 160 times higher than the Tokyo average.

Stepping inside, the first journalists to enter since the 2011 meltdown found it frozen in time.

It comes just months after shocking photos emerged of the devastation caused in the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone.

On one wall, handwriting was seen near an instrument used to measure water levels in reactor three, showing the urgency faced by workers.

(Image: PEN NEWS/GETTY)

"We don't write on the wall under a normal situation, so it indicates it was an emergency,” said a spokesman for the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Disaster struck the Fukushima plant when an earthquake unleashed a tsunami that flooded the facility on March 11, 2011.

Backup generators serving five of the plant’s six reactors were destroyed by the water, disabling crucial electronics and coolant systems.

Only reactors one, two and three were producing electricity at the time – but all three would suffer meltdowns.

In the aftermath of the disaster, desperate scenes played out in the control room for reactors three and four.

“Unit 3 did not lose DC power immediately after the tsunami,” said a 2014 report from the National Academies Press.

(Image: PEN NEWS)

“Consequently, until its batteries became depleted, operators were able to monitor plant indicators from the control room, including reactor pressure and water levels.

“They were also able to activate, monitor, and control the reactor core isolation cooling and high-pressure coolant injection systems.”

But as the battery drained away, desperate measures took hold.

“The onsite Emergency Response Centre immediately recognized the need to obtain batteries to operate the safety relief valves,” the report continued.

“Plant personnel salvaged batteries from personal automobiles; it took almost two hours to collect them and another hour to connect them to the Unit 3 control panel.”

(Image: PEN NEWS) (Image: GETTY)

Their efforts were unsuccessful – on March 14, three days after the tsunami, the reactor was rocked by a hydrogen explosion.

Reactor four, though inactive at the time, would explode a day later.

TEPCO allowed the media into the control room for reactors one and two in February 2014, but kept the control room for reactors three and four closed until now due to the radiation levels inside.

Radiation in the room is still six microsieverts per hour – compared to 0.037 microsieverts per hour in downtown Tokyo.

Of the 470,000 people evacuated during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, 154,000 were evacuated specifically because of the meltdown.

Earlier this year poisoning fears were raised after it was revealed soil from Fukushima would be used to lay roads in Japan.

The disaster was the worst nuclear incident since the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986.