Book review: Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster, by David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Stranahan
On March 18, 2011, a team from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gathered in Tokyo. Seven days earlier, a magnitude-9 quake had rattled a complex of six nuclear power plants known as Fukushima Daiichi.
by David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Stranahan
New Press
4 stars
Michael Hiltzik
On March 18, 2011, a team from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gathered in Tokyo. Seven days earlier, a magnitude-9 quake had rattled a complex of six nuclear power plants known as Fukushima Daiichi. Then came a second, more devastating blow: a tsunami that swamped the complex, flooding its electrical generators and putting its three reactors out of commission.
The reactors were soon out of control, the plant effectively disabled by that most feared event in the nuclear industry: a "station blackout", when no power is available to run any of the safety systems designed to defend the public from a runaway reaction.
The US team had been flown to Japan to help deal with the crisis, but all they knew was that the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Co, which owned the plant, were at a loss about how to deal with the catastrophe.
Today, three years after the event, only two of Japan's 50 nuclear power reactors have been permitted to restart. The wrecked Fukushima station has been leaking radioactive water into the Pacific.
These events and more are meticulously reconstructed in Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster, by David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman and Susan Stranahan of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Lochbaum and Lyman bring their scientific expertise to the topic. Stranahan, a journalist whose experience with nuclear power dates back to her coverage of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, is responsible for the book's lucid and gripping narrative.