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Day by day, it seems, emergency workers are moving closer to bringing the Fukushima nuclear crisis under control. On Monday, IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano said he had “no doubt that this crisis will be effectively overcome”. But each day, too, seems to carry a reminder of how serious the situation remains: on Monday, workers were [...]
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 [...]
As workers at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant scrambled to prevent a meltdown of cores of several reactors on Tuesday, a new problem emerged: the failure of cooling systems for several pools containing spent fuel rods. Late Tuesday, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said that the water meant to cool spent fuel in three reactors was becoming [...]
