A battered Japan faces nuclear disaster

What happened

Japan struggled this week to cope with its largest disaster since the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the country’s northeast coast triggered a tsunami that rolled six miles inland, devastating towns, obliterating villages, and causing partial meltdowns at three nuclear reactors. Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm as fires and explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, 150 miles north of Tokyo, blew holes in containment vessels in two of the plant’s six reactors, after the quake and tsunami had knocked out their cooling systems. A skeleton crew of 50 technicians risked their lives as they struggled to keep exposed white-hot nuclear fuel rods covered in seawater, in a desperate attempt to head off multiple, complete meltdowns and a large release of radioactivity. “We are on the brink,” said Hiroaki Koide, a nuclear specialist at Kyoto University. The Japanese government evacuated people living within 12 miles of the plant and urged those within 18 miles—about 140,000 people—to stay indoors and to make their homes airtight.

The apocalyptic cascade of catastrophes began last Friday when the quake, the largest to hit Japan in recorded history, launched a wall of churning water that rolled relentlessly inland, ripping homes from their foundations and tossing cars and boats as though they were toys. More than 10,000 people are believed to have been killed, tens of thousands more are injured, and up to 500,000 people have been made homeless. “Everything is lost,” said 48-year-old construction worker Takao Oyama, whose village, Saito, was completely flattened. On the coast, thousands of bodies washed up, after having been sucked out to sea. In Tokyo, an eerie silence fell over usually busy streets and restaurants, as residents alarmed by the nuclear crisis 150 miles away stayed indoors.

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What the editorials said

“Strange as it may sound,” it could have been far worse, said The Washington Post. If the quake had struck closer to Tokyo or other large urban areas farther south, or if Japan’s building codes had not been the best in the world, the death toll could have been much higher. In Tokyo, the skyscrapers swayed but remained standing; shopkeepers dashed to emergency shelters, but there was no looting. “It was a reminder of just how much of the damage of a ‘natural’ disaster is avoidable” in a well-ordered society.

Still, the size of this earthquake overpowered even Japan’s elaborate defenses against natural disaster, said The New York Times. The quake knocked out power to the cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi, and the seawalls proved no match for the tsunami that flooded the plant’s backup diesel generators. The country now faces what Prime Minister Kan described as its “most difficult challenge since World War II,” said The Christian Science Monitor. Compounding the catastrophe are a pre-quake “national mood of gloom and defeatism” fueled by Japan’s polarized political system, which has produced five prime ministers in five years, and an economy mired in two decades of stagnation. If there is a “silver lining” to this disaster, it’s that Japan now has a chance to “tap the unity of its people” and reform its society from the ground up.

What the columnists said

“Pundits said only a major crisis will bring about change in Japan,” said William Pesek in the New York Post. Well, here it is. Days before the quake, Japan’s foreign minister was forced to resign over a clerical error, and the opposition was “digging up petty dirt” on the prime minister too. “Such distractions are no longer an option.” This is the Japanese leadership’s golden opportunity to “roll up their sleeves,” reverse wage stagnation, and rein in the world’s largest public debt as the country embarks on a massive rebuilding program.

All that would require leadership, and thus far, there’s little on display, said Lennox Samuels in TheDailyBeast.com. The government seems to be fumbling this crisis, giving out inadequate or confusing advice at best, and exacerbating the national “mood of foreboding and alarm.” The administration seems overwhelmed by a disaster that has forced 11 of the country’s 55 nuclear plants to shut down and resulted in rolling blackouts across the country.

What administration wouldn’t be? said Robert Madsen in Foreign Policy. As with the 2008–2009 financial crisis, mankind is frequently wrong-footed by “black swans,” events that seem so beyond the realm of possibility that we fail to prepare for them. This disaster is a failure not of human engineering but “of human imagination.” Modern engineers and scientists thought that by quake-proofing buildings, and putting backup generators and thick containment vessels at nuclear plants, “humankind had triumphed over risk,” said Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post. Sadly, “as the people sealed inside their homes” near Japan’s broken nuclear plants could tell us, the experts were wrong.

Which is all the more reason why we, in California, need to take heed, said Donald Prothero in the Los Angeles Times. “Several of the faults in our region are overdue for major quakes.” Although our building codes are among the most stringent in America, they don’t begin to compare to Japan’s. Our two nuclear power plants are designed to withstand 7.0 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes, but the San Andreas fault is capable of exerting much more force. “Those who ignore these warnings now will regret it when the next Big One hits.”