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The Fukushima nuclear disaster didn’t kill a single person, but it may take out an industry: the nuclear power industry. That’s what it looks like — at least in developed countries like Japan — nearly a year after the meltdown began. Of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan, just two are operating right now, and [...]
The headlines were extraordinary: “Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis,” the New York Times wrote a few days ago. “Tokyo Evacuation ‘Was Considered’,” said the Sydney Morning Herald. “Japan Urged Calm While It Mulled Tokyo Evacuation,” wrote … hey, TIME magazine. The stories detailed the Rebuild Japan report, a deep and independent investigation of the events [...]
YOSHIHIKO NODA, the Prime Minister of Japan, talking about the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in a press conference. Noda declared an end to the nuclear disaster—more than nine months after an earthquake and tsunami ruined the nuclear plants, leading to a meltdown—but other experts aren’t so sure. More than 160,000 people from the area are [...]
Summer has arrived in Japan. The pink cherry blossoms that offered some aesthetic respite from the destruction in the weeks after March 11 are long gone, and the heat —and all of the attendant challenges of living long-term with a nuclear disaster — have arrived. In Tokyo, where the mayor has set an ambitious energy [...]
Each day at the stricken Fukushima power plant seems to bring a new piece of troubling news—today, reports surfaced that three workers at the Fukushima plant had been hospitalized after radiation levels reported at the plant spiked to “10,000 times above normal.” There were also reports that the No. 3 reactor vessel had been damaged, [...]
It’s worth remembering, as the battle to prevent a massive radioactive release at the Fukushima power plant approaches the end of its second week, what a best-case scenario might now look like. In the best-case, emergency crews will restore cooling to the reactor cores and spent fuel pools and thus prevent the further release of [...]
From the beginning, the Japanese response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been a constant improvisation. After the double blow of a quake and a tsunami knocked out power to the plant, officials have desperately tried to keep nuclear material at active reactors and spent fuel pools cool, to prevent overheating and more wide-scale [...]
The news from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan just keeps getting worse. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that at least a “partial meltdown” seemed to be happening, and today the U.S. government advised its citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant. The worst-case scenario—a release of a large [...]
Update 3/16/11 3:03 PM: The news doesn’t get better. At an afternoon Congressional hearing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko said that the all the water in the spent fuel pod in the number 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has almost certainly boiled away: We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly [...]
On Monday, my colleague Jeffrey Kluger wrote an insightful post, “Butterfly Wings and Nuclear Disasters,” about how—with all respect to the Greek dramatists— there really is no such thing as a single “tragic flaw”; rather, tragedy results most often in the real world from the accumulation of small but significant mishaps. While that holds true [...]
