A Brief History
On March 12, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan was devastated by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, causing a reactor to explode and release radiation into the environment.
Digging Deeper
To this day a 12 mile radius “no-go” zone is imposed around the disaster site, with only scientists and technicians with appropriate protection allowed to visit. Radioactive water will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean for a period of 3 decades.
Far from the only nuclear plant disaster, other disasters have cast a pall on what has been touted as “clean” energy from nuclear fission. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 not only contaminated a 19-mile radius exclusion zone, but cast radioactive fallout over a much larger area, leaving about 100 people dead and cancerous effects in the decades since. Compounding the problem is the current Russia-Ukraine War that threatens to disrupt not only the Chernobyl disaster site, but other Ukrainian nuclear power plants as well.
Another such nuclear power disaster occurred at 3 Mile Island, in Pennsylvania in 1979, a partial meltdown that could have been so much worse.
In the face of such accidents and natural disasters, the prospect of wartime or terrorist damage, and the problems of disposal of nuclear waste, are Nuclear Power Plants worth it?
Question for students (and subscribers): Should we or should we not suspend the construction of new nuclear power plants? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Burns, Edward. Nuclear Power or a Promise Lost: A Policy Maker’s Guide for a Future of Carbon Free, Sustainable Energy. BrownWalker Press / Universal Publishers, 2020.
Devanney, Jack. Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop: at Solving the Gordian Knot of Electricity Poverty and Global Warming. BookBaby, 2020.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Digital Globe of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
