Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster

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Mežid, 16; Ali, 17
Slovenia

28 March 2017 at 13:05

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It’s been five years since an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 – the biggest in the nation’s recorded history and one of the five most powerful recorded ever around the world – and subsequent tsunami destroyed large parts of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, eventually killing more than 20,000 men, women, children and displaced over 200,000.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011, resulted in massive radioactive contamination of the Japanese mainland, as well as brought to the forefront the dangers of worldwide nuclear radiation. Almost six years later, after-effects of the catastrophic event continue to plague the world, making it the greatest environmental disaster of all time.

Here are a few facts about the disaster:
-1 300 tons (272,152 liters) of radioactive water – enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every eight days – enters the Pacific Ocean each day. Harvey Wasserman, journalist and advocate for renewable energy, told RT: “This is an apocalyptic event. This is something that could contaminate the entire Pacific Ocean. It is extremely serious. The reality is that Tokyo Electric does not know what is happening and does not know how to control what is going on. Our entire planet is at risk here.”
-The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant holds 11,400 fuel rods – Fukushima reactor No. 4 alone has 1300 fuel rods stored in a leaking pool. These fuel rods need to be manually removed, along with 6,300 fuel rods stored nearby. Since the fuel rods, which contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, have to be extracted manually to avoid a worse disaster than the March 2011 nuclear crisis, even the tiniest mistake could lead to a nuclear chain reaction.
-Experts call it the biggest release of radiation to a body of water in the history of the world, much worse than Chernobyl. They project that the entire Pacific Ocean will have Cesium levels 5 to 10 times higher than what they were at the peak of atomic bomb testing decades ago.

– According to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), more than 1,100 square kilometers of villages, mountains and forests remain uninhabitable; fully cleaning the site will require half a century.

-We have endless releases into the Pacific Ocean that will be ongoing for not only our lifetimes, but our children’s lifetimes, concludes researcher Christina Consolo. She tells RT: “…The worst case scenario could play out in death to billions of people. A true apocalypse… A weather event, power outage, earthquake, tsunami, cooling system failure, or explosion and fire in any way, shape, or form, at any location on the Fukushima site, could cascade into an event of that magnitude as well.”
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