Disaster in Japan

An overview of Japan’s disaster

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake off the Pacific coast of Japan set off a tsunami that deluged coastal areas in the north. More than 13,000 people were still missing as of late April, and 14,133 died in the disaster. The quake and tsunami also damaged cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Workers struggled to keep reactors from overheating; radiation escaped despite frantic efforts to contain it. Prime Minister Naoto Kan called this Japan’s worst crisis since World War II.

The quake

At 9 on the Richter scale, this was the strongest earthquake in Japan’s history. The quake originated 230 miles northeast of Tokyo, 80 miles offshore and 15 miles below the earth’s surface. Skyscrapers swayed visibly, and highways buckled. The earthquake has been followed by more than 100 aftershocks, some of them as strong as major quakes.

The tsunami

Set off by the quake, waves as tall as 33 feet washed over sea walls, flooding cities and farmland. The waves, mixed with mud, swept boats and cars inland, destroying houses and burying rice fields. The tsunami sent surges all the way to California, where it sank boats in coastal harbors. For brief background on tsunamis, go here.

The nuclear crisis

The earthquake and tsunami disabled the cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which keep reactor cores from overheating. Three of the reactors had been shut down for inspection before the quake, and the other three shut down immediately; but nuclear fuel remains hot after shutdown, and needs cooling to prevent overheating. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (or Tepco), which runs the plant, has struggled to keep the reactor and spent fuel pool from overheating. Four of the six reactors at the plant have had serious problems, including explosions, leaks of radioactive gas, a fire in a pool of spent fuel, and partial meltdowns. (Meltdown means that the core of a reactor has overheated enough to melt the nuclear fuel rods. If enough of this nuclear material melts, it can burn through the containment structure and radiation can escape.)

Traces of radiation have been found in Tokyo’s drinking water and in water that empties from the reactors to the ocean. This is the world’s worst nuclear crisis since a meltdown at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union, in 1986. For more details on the nuclear emergency, see NPR.

Effects of the disaster

• 440,000 people displaced from their homes by the quake and tsunami were living in temporary shelters as of 3/17. (By late April, the number had fallen to 130,000.) There have been shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine in the shelters.

• The government urged the roughly 80,000 people living within 12 miles of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to evacuate. Many who live further away have chosen to leave for fear that the danger is worse than the government admits. (The U.S. government has warned Americans in Japan to stay at least 50 miles from the plant.)

• 6 million households, or one in ten, lost electricity.

• Northern Japan struggled with shortages of food, fuel and water.

• Train service shut down temporarily in central and northern Japan (including Tokyo). Both rails and roads were badly damaged.

• Airlines rerouted flights away from Tokyo and the north in order to avoid airborne radiation around the plant.

• Tokyo’s subways, the world’s busiest, closed for a day; many workers had to walk for hours to reach their homes.

• Standard & Poor’s estimates it will cost as much as $609 billion to rebuild the stricken area.

Economic ripple effects

The crisis in Japan interrupted manufacturing in some areas, and this slowed or stopped factories around the world that rely on Japanese parts. For more, see the New York Times.

Updates

3/16: The chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that radiation levels are extremely high at the plant—higher than the Japanese government admits—and that this will make it harder to correct the problem. He stated that fuel rods at one of the reactors were exposed and bleeding radiation into the air.

3/21: The BBC reports that:

• Electricity has been restored to three of the six reactors. Engineers hope to test water pumps soon.

• The government has stopped some food shipments from areas around the Fukushima plant, because of radioactive traces in vegetables and water. Villagers living near the plant have been told not to drink tap water. Levels of radioactive iodine far higher than the legal limits have been found in spinach and milk produced near the nuclear plant.

• Nearly 900,000 households are still without water.

For more, see the BBC.

3/22: A month before the earthquake, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the Fukushima reactors, despite reports that “maintenance management was inadequate” and that the “quality of inspection was insufficient.” For more on this see the New York Times.

3/24: Radioactive iodine has been found in Tokyo’s water supply, at levels unsafe for infants. Authorities have warned parents not to give babies tap water to drink, and not to use it when mixing formula.

4/1: 25,000 Japanese and American rescue workers will search the coast for the 16,000 people still missing.

4/2: Radioactive water is leaking into the Pacific Ocean from a maintenance pit near the power station—an unexpected side-effect of pumping tons of water into spent fuel pools to cool the reactors. (Workers have still not been able to repair the cooling systems.) Authorities say they have little choice but to continue pouring water into the pools; if they stop, the fuel will melt down further, and more radioactive material will be released. For more on this, go here.

4/4: In order to make room for highly radioactive water in storage tanks, the power company plans to release more than 11,000 tons of less radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

4/5: American engineers at the scene reported that the troubled nuclear plant could face problems indefinitely. They said that filling the containment structures with radioactive water put added stress on them, raising the threat of a rupture during an aftershock.

4/12: Japan has raised the rating of the accident at Fukushima from 5 to 7, the highest number on the scale that measures the seriousness of nuclear accidents. This puts the crisis at the same level as the Chernobyl explosion, though the Fukushima plant has so far released only about 1/10 as much radioactivity. Officials said the radiation released in Japan could eventually exceed the totals at Chernobyl.

4/21: The Japanese government has cordoned off 12 mile radius around the power plant, and forbidden unauthorized people to enter.

5/5: Workers in protective suits entered a building housing damaged reactors, in order to install a ventilator that will filter radioactive particles, reducing the radiation in the building so that workers can enter and install a new cooling system.

5/9: Stating that his country needs to create a new energy policy that includes renewable energy and conservation, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Japan would abandon plans to build new nuclear reactors.

5/17: A study of lawsuits filed against Japan’s nuclear industry shows a pattern of hiding or underestimating the danger of earthquakes in order to avoid expensive upgrades. All of these suits were defeated, leading many to believe that the courts are part of a culture of collusion among the government, power companies, and nuclear regulators.

6/2: The Prime Minister survived a no-confidence vote in Parliament, after promising to resign once the worst of the crisis is over.

6/6: Officials said that the Fukushima plant may have emitted more than twice as much radioactivity in the days after the earthquake than previously reported. This admission bolsters suspicions that authorities intentionally withheld the truth from the public.

7/13: The Prime Minister said Japan should work toward eliminating its dependence on nuclear power—a sharp reversal of the country’s long-term energy policy.

August: Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda has been chosen to replace Naoto Kan as prime minister. Unlike Kan, Noda believes that Japan should continue to rely on nuclear energy.

How dangerous is the radiation released so far?

Scientists disagree on the danger of small doses of radiation to human health. Some say it makes sense to estimate proportionally based on statistics for larger doses; others say there may be a threshold below which exposure poses no danger.

The U.S. uses a unit called the rem (which stands for Roentgen Equivalent Man) to measure radiation doses. (Europe and Asia use a unit called the millisievert, which equals 0.1 rem.) We receive 0.3 rem per year from natural background radiation, and 0.0005 rem from a standard dental x-ray. A quarter-mile from the Fukushima plant, radiation levels of 0.1 rem per hour have been measured; exposure to this radiation for four days would increase a person’s risk of cancer. For more on the risks of radiation exposure, see the New York Times. And for an explanation of the different types of radiation and how they affect the body, see this accompanying article.

Could the nuclear crisis have been prevented?

According to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, the Tokyo Electric Power Company has a record of cutting corners in order to increase profits. This, combined with lax oversight by the Japanese government, contributed to the crisis.

What will this mean for nuclear power in the U.S.?

No new nuclear power plants have been built in the U.S. in 30 years, but the industry was enjoying a renaissance here until the disaster in Japan, with energy companies filing applications for 14 new plants. Backers of nuclear power (including President Obama) have touted it as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels. The crisis at the Fukushima plant, however—which occurred despite Japan’s many precautions—reawakened many Americans’ doubts about nuclear power. These doubts go back to the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, in which a partial melting of nuclear fuel was stopped and contained. Defenders of nuclear power argue that Japan is much more vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis than the U.S.; opponents point to the danger of terrorist attacks, and the potentially catastrophic results of a major accident. In general, conservatives support an expanded nuclear power industry, and liberals oppose it; many moderate Democrats cautiously support it.

For more on the imact of this disaster on nuclear power in the U.S., see the Huffington Post.

How you can help

For a list of organizations now helping in Japan, go to Yahoo News.

About nuclear power

As of 2008, there were more than 430 nuclear power plants operating in the world—104 of them in the U.S., supplying 20 percent of our electricity and making us the worldwide leader in nuclear energy production. Like coal-burning power plants, nuclear plants heat water until it turns to steam; the steam pressure drives a turbine, which generates electricity. Unlike coal-burning plants, nuclear power facilities generate heat through nuclear fission, the splitting of atoms. They don’t emit carbon dioxide—which most scientists agree contributes to global warming—and many therefore see nuclear power as a cleaner alternative to burning fossil fuels.

The negatives loom large, however. Spent fuel remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and safe storage is a problem; each year, the average power plant creates about 20 metric tons of used fuel, which emits radiation and heat that will eventually corrode any container. (A metric ton equals 1,000 kilograms, or about 2,204 pounds.) Furthermore, an accident at a nuclear power plant can be catastrophic: when the Chernobyl reactor exploded, it dispersed 50 tons of radioactive material, eventually causing thousands of cases of cancer and other illnesses. (It’s estimated that cancer deaths directly caused by Chernobyl will reach a total of about 4,000.) Proponents of nuclear power point out that Chernobyl was badly designed and operated, but the consequences of an accident are so severe that many oppose nuclear power despite the industry’s assurances of its safety.

For more on the basics of nuclear power, see How Stuff Works.

The G.E. connection

The “Mark 1” nuclear reactors at Fukushima were designed by General Electric, in the 1960s. In the U.S., 16 nuclear power plants use the same reactors. Nuclear engineers have long warned that the containment vessel around a Mark 1 reactor would probably burst if the cooling system ever failed and the fuel rods overheated. A G.E. spokesman defended the design, saying that, in more than 40 years of use, “There has never been a breach of a Mark 1 containment system.” For more on this, see the New York Times.

Daiichi

This word, part of the nuclear power station’s name and also the name of many Japanese businesses, simply means “Number One.”

Opinion

Should the nuclear crisis in Japan stop us from building more nuclear power plants?

• Yes: Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, 3/15/11

• No: William Saletan, Slate, 3/14/11

“Better design, construction and management will not solve the problems with nuclear power because we cannot engineer away hubris, greed, unintended consequences, fraud, human error, disasters that exceed the design parameters and the long-term challenges of radioactive waste.” — Jono Miller, in a letter to the New York Times

“…production of coal power is responsible for many times as many deaths per unit of energy generated as nuclear power. It’s human nature to pay more attention to big catastrophes than to ‘routine’ deaths. We should not fall into this error in attempting to design rational policies.” — Ted Bunn, in a letter to the New York Times

Will Japan’s crisis derail the global economic recovery? A roundup of opinion articles from The Week.

For more information

On Japan’s disaster in general: New York Times

On the nuclear crisis: Wikipedia

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Last updated 10/14/11

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