Toshio Nishi
As Japan teeters on the brink of nuclear disaster, has it learned any lessons at all?
When the worst earthquake in Japan’s history pulverized its northern coastline in 2011, walls of black saltwater from the deep Pacific surged over four of six nuclear reactors located on the Fukushima coast. Though they were supposedly designed to withstand the worst quake imaginable along the Ring of Fire, the reactors quickly succumbed to the natural disaster, breaking like toys. To be precise, three reactors had outright meltdowns or, more correctly, melt-throughs. One, Reactor No. 4, broke beyond repair and posed further catastrophe. Two others simply stopped dead. Within hours, one of the melt-throughs exploded, spewing lethal radioactive waste into the air, soil, underground water veins and, steadily, into the Pacific. Some eighteen thousand and five hundred souls died that cold March day. Many of the dead remain missing even now.
Three years on, a dark threat of further tragedy yet hangs over Fukushima. On the fourth floor of Reactor No. 4—the reactor that exploded on the first day of the earthquake—1,331 spent fuel rods remain stored in cooling water in a large steel tank. The tank, jolted by the quake, tilts to about 30 degrees. The six reactors at Fukushima have produced 14,225 spent fuel rods, all of which are stored in the same way at the reactor sites. To underscore the lethal potential of this situation, a single exposed spent fuel rod, 4 meters-long and 1 centimeter in diameter, will kill a man in four seconds.… Continue reading