A blast at a Japanese power station Saturday leveled a building housing its reactor and stoked fears of a nuclear meltdown, as officials searched for thousands of people missing more than a day after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.
Nearly 140,000 people have been evacuated around from areas near two nuclear power plants, the International Atomic Energy Agency told Reuters.
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3 comments:
This is all very scary.
What a terrible tragedy.
One has to hope that when constructing these nuclear plants, they took their history of earthquakes into consideration.
The Japanese build to some of the highest earthquake standards in the world. It is probable that no one with nuclear technology involved has actually experienced this magnitude of an earthquake. My husband (who is an engineer) says that the plants were designed to shut off, and apparently did so, when the earthquake hit; but the cooling systems failed somehow, which is why there are problems now. No doubt, all of the nuclear people are paying close attention and will learn from this experience. It's just a terrible, terrible, terrible disaster, and that is probably the only good that can come of it.
I am brokenhearted about this. I lived in Japan, speak Japanese, and have some friends who are from this area. Many of the buildings survived the terrible earthquake, but were unable to ward off the effects of the tsunami. The irony of this is that "tsunami" is a Japanese word. I guess that the ancestors of the Japanese people developed the word because they knew from experience what the devestation could be like. Maybe we should have paid more attention to them! Still, it is just horrific to have a quake of such magnitude, and then a tsunami on top of it.
AZ
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