Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
A magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Tohoku on 11 March 2011 generated a tsunami that reached the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant about fifty minutes later, with waves of roughly fourteen metres against a seawall built for five and a half. The reactors had shut down automatically at the earthquake. The plant survived that; it did not survive the water. The tsunami flooded the basements housing the emergency diesel generators and the seawater pumps, and knocked out the switchyard. With no power to circulate coolant, decay heat boiled off the water in units 1, 2 and 3, exposed the fuel, and produced hydrogen from the reaction of steam with the zirconium cladding. Hydrogen explosions destroyed the upper structures of units 1, 3 and 4 over the following days. Three cores melted through their pressure vessels. Around 154,000 people were evacuated. Radiation released was roughly a tenth of Chernobyl, largely to the sea. The tsunami itself killed close to 20,000 people. Radiation is officially credited with one death, a worker's lung cancer recognised in 2018; the evacuation itself is estimated to have caused well over two thousand, chiefly among the elderly and the ill. The Japanese parliamentary inquiry called it a profoundly man-made disaster, citing collusion between the operator TEPCO, the regulator and the ministry, and known and ignored tsunami risk assessments. Japan shut down all its reactors, Germany announced a nuclear phase-out, and global nuclear construction slowed for a decade. Decommissioning is expected to take decades and the melted fuel has still only been sampled in grams. Japan began releasing treated water into the Pacific in 2023 over regional objections. Several Japanese reactors have since restarted, and the country's climate targets now assume more of them will.
- Year: 2011 CE
- Category: Political
