Risk society

On Friday 11 March 2011, at 14:46 local time, Japan was struck by the most powerful earthquake in the country’s history. The epicentre of the quake was located some 130 kilometres east of the city of Sendai, 70 kilometres off the coast of the Tohoku region. The suboceanic tremors of the violent quake, measured at 9.0 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, then caused a destructive tsunami that hit the coast roughly 40 minutes after the main quake. The waves, exceeding heights of 12–14 metres, caused massive amounts of destruction and loss of life, as it travelled more than 10 kilometres inland. Buildings and bridges collapsed, entire trains filled with passengers were buried under the avalanche of mud and water and entire cities were eradicated. The losses were staggering: more than 15,000 people lost their lives in the flood itself, another 5,000 were injured and more than 4,500 people are still, to this day, reported missing. With regard to sheer material damages, more than 250,000 buildings were completely or partially destroyed by the water. ¹ However, the full ramifications of the tragedy in Japan would prove to be much more frightening, as another serious consequence of the tsunami turned out to be the subsequent failure of several Japanese nuclear power plants. Several nuclear facilities were flooded following the earthquake. Fukushima 1, a six-reactor facility – which had been built, supposedly, to withstand tsunamis – was hardest hit, and, although protective safety walls had been erected all around the facility, these were built to withstand waves up to only six metres in height. The wave which hit Fukushima 1, however, exceeded 13 metres in height before it broke and rolled back; by then, all six reactors had been flooded. Three out of the six reactors had been shut down for routine maintenance before the tsunami hit. Reactor 4 had been de-fuelled but 5 and 6 still held active fuel supplies when the wave struck them. Meanwhile, the other reactors shut down automatically and emergency backup generators were engaged the moment the tremors from the quake had first registered on sensors in the plant’s emergency system. The flooding of the reactors, however, disabled every backup generator except one and caused the plant to be cut off from the regular power grid as well. Fukushima staff were able, using the one functional generator, to keep reactors 5 and 6 in a sufficiently cooled, shut-down state. However, the fuel basin with discarded fuel rods, along with reactors 1, 2 and 3, was left entirely without power and thus without cooling. This caused the fuel rods to overheat and resulted in at least one confirmed meltdown and possibly several others. Explosions and fires destroyed large parts of the reactor buildings, leaking large amounts of radioactive material into the surroundings. In the days to follow, ocean water was pumped into the reactors, in an attempt to regain control and contain the meltdowns and supply the facility with cooling. In order to make room for this large amount of new, massively radiated ocean water that had been used to cool to the failing facility during the meltdown, the plant’s water basins – which contained polluted water from the facility’s regular cooling procedures – had to be drained out into the ocean, releasing large quantities of radioactive water back into the environment. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) classified the incident as the worst kind of nuclear disaster – a so-called level 7 or ‘Major Accident’ on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). ² The world has witnessed only one such level 7 nuclear disaster prior to the one in Fukushima. In 1986, the Soviet nuclear power plant at Chernobyl lost control of its reactor 4 during a routine shutdown. The reactor was supposed to be turned off, in order to allow for a series of tests on new security procedures and protocols, but something went wrong during shutdown and a violent explosion tore a hole in the roof of reactor 4, releasing a cloud of radioactive material into the plant’s surroundings. Thousands of people were directly affected by the incident, with many Russians succumbing to radioactive exposure, others falling severely ill in the days to follow and even more still being forcibly evicted from their homes (Chernobyl Forum 2003–2006, 2006). Meanwhile, the citizens of Ukraine, Belarus and the rest of Europe found themselves at the mercy of the weather, unable to do anything but wait and hope, literally, for the wind not to blow the wrong way or take a turn that would bring the radioactive cloud into their areas.