Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Essay

This paper has the objective to give the precise details of what happened in Fukushima. That should be the occurrences as they occurred in their order during the nuclear, and what led to the nuclear. That will necessitate the look at the earthquake which was the source of the whole incident. The paper will also focus on the reasons why the nuclear incident came to arise despite the government having a lot of trust on it. There will also be some focus on what was the reaction by the government and the public at large after the disaster. To conclude the paper, it will be a look at the effects that were left by the radioactivity; the effects are both long term and short term. That was to those who occupied the place before the nuclear and many years now after the atomic radioactivity.

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The Fukushima Dai-chi nuclear incident was an energy disaster that happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant whose location was at Okuma Fukushima prefecture. It was primarily brought to initiation by the tsunami which followed the Tohoku earthquake as it happened on the March 2011(Holt, Campbel & Nikitin, 2012). Just after the earthquake occurred, the active reactors shutdown within no time their sustained fission reactions. More to that, the tsunami interrupted the emergency generators, making them into dysfunction. Of which they were due to be rendering power to manage and work on the pumps required to cool the reactors. The reduction in cooling brought about three nuclear meltdowns (Kamil, 2011), hydrogen-air explosions and the release of radioactive materials. It happened in the first three units for four consecutive days. The unavailability of cooling also leads the pool which stored already spent fuel as stored in reactor four to overheat due to heat caused by decay.

The government agencies and the TEPCO preparations were for the nuclear incident. The tsunami which brought about the atomic disaster should have been seen coming, and there should have been some adequate preparation. The imprecision about the public roles and the non-governmental institutions in such an incident was an element in the poor response in Fukushima. A year after the nuclear, the prime minister admitted that the government shares the blame too. Which was because the government had been made blind by the colossal trust they had about their technology not minding the possibility of it being faulty. Japan's prime minister at the time said that the country was not prepared for the tsunami and the nuclear plants were not supposed to have their location near the ocean.

There were no deaths following the short while radiation exposure (Kinoshita et al., 2011), though some deaths were recorded in the evacuation of the people from the nearby area. There were very few cancer cases expectations due to the accumulated radiation exposures. The incident posed high risks of cancers like; breast cancer and leukemia to the people from around. The WHO organization determined that the people were exposed to little radiation hence radiation-induced health effects were below amounts of which could be detected. Even with that, a few cases of thyroid cancer have been found at an average of (6/100,000), which is higher than the average rate (Iida, 2013). And there have been also claims of food chain contamination.

References

Holt, M., Campbell, R. J., & Nikitin, M. B. (2012). Fukushima nuclear disaster. Congressional Research Service.

Iida, T. (2013). FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR DISASTER. SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, 84.

Kamil, F. (2011). Fukushima nuclear accident. Decouverte (Paris), 28-31.

Kinoshita, N., Sueki, K., Sasa, K., Kitagawa, J. I., Ikarashi, S., Nishimura, T. & Sato, M. (2011). Assessment of individual radionuclide distributions from the Fukushima nuclear accident covering central-east Japan. 108(49), 19526-19529.