Japan Marks 3rd Anniversary of Tsunami Disaster

AmiMoJo writes "Today Japan marks the third anniversary of the 11th of March 2011 disaster when the country was hit by a magnitude 9 earthquake huge tsunami and severe nuclear accident. More than 18,500 people were killed or went missing. Nearly 3,000 others died while evacuated from their homes, and over a quarter of a million people were still living in temporary housing as of February. Work to build new housing on higher ground is lagging behind schedule.

Three reactors melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant following the quake and tsunami, but the exact cause of the accident is still unknown. How massive amounts of radioactive materials from the reactors were dispersed is also unclear. Today was also the day when hundreds of former residents announced that they were suing TEPCO, the plant operator, and the government for additional compensation." Although the nuclear accident was dwarfed by the other devastation, the effects of the meltdown will be felt for much longer. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published an article today on the reactors that didn't meltdown, and the NRC chair has some comments on the progress at Fukishima.

Comments

Dwarfed? yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the nuclear accident was dwarfed by the other devastation,

Yet the nuclear accident is all people panic about, completely forgetting the actual tsunami.

Re:Dwarfed? yeah right

[peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_ !]

You mean the 20,000 deaths caused by the Tsunami compared to the 0 deaths related to anything nuclear, where the handful of deaths surrounding the incident were caused by inaction and fear of radiation?

http://fukushima.ans.org/

The physical effects of the Tsunami were incredibly more devastating than the Fukushima meltdown, however the psychological effects of the meltdown are truly staggering. It's a difference between facts and perception that, three years later, isn't going anywhere it seems. Nuclear is only scary if you don't look at what it actually is.

Re:Dwarfed? yeah right

[AmiMoJo]

The key difference being that the tsunami was a natural disaster that was difficult to prevent. The Fukushima accident was caused by incompetence and could have been avoided, as it was at other nuclear plants.

Focusing on deaths is arbitrary and designed solely to try and underplay the devastating effects of the nuclear disaster on the people forced to evacuate and on Japan's economy. As TFA points out there are still too many unknowns to say exactly how bad Fukushima is.

Re:Dwarfed? yeah right

[AmiMoJo]

Some 160,000 people were evacuated as a precautionary measure, and prolonging the evacuation resulted in the deaths of about 1100 of them due to stress, and some due to disruption of medical and social welfare facilities.

So you are basically agreeing with me. There was no way to know how bad the disaster was at the time they evacuated, and the levels in the evacuation area above safe limits in parts so clearly it was necessary. Your map has hundreds of metres per pixel, it doesn't show hot spots which are the problem, only an average.

I'm not sure what your point is... It was a disaster, people died as a result.

Re:Why can't this shit happen to North Korea?

[The_Human_Diversion]

Why do you hate the Japanese? The A-bombs likely saved a million+ Japanese lives. Invasion or starving them out, would have cost much more.

No they weren't ready to surrender. That's pure bullshit.

Has there ever been any conclusive proof on this? I'm sure that's the thought process the US wanted everyone to think, as the US is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon outside of testing. But the victors usually do get to write history, and I've never seen any kind of historical (or even statistical) consensus that dropping the bomb saved lives. Seems to me that the Truman administration -and any administrations following- would want the prevailing narrative to be "dropping the bombs saved lives." I have no doubt it saved allied lives, but just how many?

I watched it on TV

[lemur3]

I remember when this happened it was like 1am or so.. maybe a bit later and I was flipping through channels and I saw this weird looking flood type thing.. and a bunch of Japanese looking text.... it was the NHK channel

it was going for a very long time, perhaps an hour or more, before it appeared on your CNNs and and NBCs and such..

It was shocking and compelling footage from a helicopter of the tsunami rolling over the landscape..

it was an interesting way to come up on a news story... it was in a language I didnt understand, not on a "news" channel (this channel normally just had japanese language variety type programming) and I couldn't even quite tell what was happening at first.. but by the warnings on the screen, and the tone of the voices of the people talking you knew it was a huge event.. you could see that it was..

over the next few days that channel was what I watched almost exclusively.. I never understood a word of it.. but the scope of things just got worse and worse.. and that was something that seemed missing from the American coverage.... it never quite conveyed the violence, the horror and the magnitude.. ..it is kind of hard for CNN do when they need to cut away for Cheerios commercials

Re:I watched it on TV

[AmiMoJo]

I was in Japan when it happened.

It was mid afternoon and I was doing some shopping in a model train shop in Akiba. 5th floor. Everything started to sway a lot and I knew it was big, but at the time didn't really appreciate just how big. Japan is mostly earthquake proof so it's not like buildings were falling down around me or anything, but the shop took some damage as stuff was knocked over. When it finally stopped everyone made their way down the stairs and out onto the street, away from buildings in case of aftershocks and falling debris.

I sent an email to my mother from my phone, letting her know I was okay. After a while people just went back to shopping again, or wondering around seeing if there was much damage. There wasn't really in Tokyo, a few burst pipes and bits fallen off buildings but nothing too terrible. Some shops closed, others stayed open for a while but then decided to close early as news came in that the trains were not running.

I was actually kind of annoyed about the trains and eventually walked home since it was only maybe 5-6km. Watched some coverage on the news that evening with friends and it slowly started to become apparent just what had happened and how bad it was. More and more footage kept coming in and we just couldn't stop watching. NHK covered it 24/7 for the next week or so.

The next day we were hearing that Fukushima was in crisis, but there was little information to go on. Foreign news agencies were hyping it up, CNN called it worse than Hiroshima. People were mostly quite calm about it though, more worried than anything. Over the next few days it got worse and worse, but even so there wasn't mass panic.

The real concern now is the long term effects. People are aware that it took years for children near Chernobyl to be diagnosed with cancer, so they want their own children checked regularly to catch it as early as possible. Some people say it isn't needed, but if you had been in Japan at the time and seen the lack of information and clarity from the government and TEPCO you would understand why they feel they can't take their word for that.

Re:Why can't this shit happen to North Korea?

[AmiMoJo]

Japan was close to surrender before the bombs were dropped. It's a well established historical fact. The situation was already dire, the Pacific fleet was mostly resting on the bottom, Russia was threatening to attack from the west, it was obvious that victory was impossible and defeat was only a matter of time. Even the military knew it, which is why they were resorting to ever more desperate tactics like suicide attacks.

There are plenty of letters written by those in positions of power at the time stating all this, it was very clear to them. The political will to do it was proving hard to muster, but it was building and it's doubtful that the bombs shorted the war by more than weeks or a few months at most. In particular the threat of being split in two like Germany if Russia attacked meant that surrender would actually have been preferable.

America had developed this terrible new weapon and realized that it was only a matter of time before others did too. They wanted to find out what the effects of a nuclear attack would be, especially on cities and human beings. Computer modelling and the like didn't exist, but here was an opportunity to try it out.

If the goal was simply to end the war swiftly the bombs could have been dropped on unpopulated or remote military only targets. They were not, they were dropped on civilian cities. I have yet to hear an explanation of why that was, other than to conduct tests. How do you explain it?