Comparing The Fukushima And The Chernobyl Disasters

On March 11th, 2011 an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The actual earthquake did minimal damage to all 4 reactors. The resulting tsunami destroyed the 16 diesel backup generators dedicated to cooling the reactors. As a result of overheating, hydrogen explosions damaged Reactors 1, 2, and 3. Reactor 4 was offline for maintenance at the time, but over 1,400 fuel rods in a stored above the reactor were exposed to air. The result was the release of approximately 370,000 terabecquerels of radiation. The situation was declared a Level 7 (major ongoing radioactive accident) by the International Atomic Energy Agency . The only other time this level has been reached was at Chernobyl in 1986.

Event sequence following the earthquake to reactors one through three: “loss of AC power, loss of cooling, water levels down to top fuel, reactor pressure vessel damage, fire pumps with fresh water, hydrogen explosion” resulting to be the world’s worst nuclear disasters since Chernobyl. Although there were no direct fatalities linked to the accident, increases of diseases such as lung cancer, esophagus cancer, prostate cancer, stomach cancer, thyroid cancer, have increased 40-60% (http://apjjf.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/4382) being a more recent, will take years to see radiation induced

Over 537 total deaths have already been linked to accident at Fukushima, and that number is still rising. Through a large spread of different causes, radiation tainted beef to name one, people are being affected every day. This all started on March 11, 201, when a 7.1- level earthquake and 15- meter high tsunami duoed to take down the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. With the destruction that has already been caused, Fukushima will go down as one of the worst power plant disasters in history.

On April 26, 1986, at Chernobyl power plant, in Ukraine, testing was being conducted on reactor 4 to see how the reactor would cope with lower power output. After testing was complete, one of the operators forgot to reset the power outage to the 30% standard requirement, therefore it caused a devastating chain of events to occur. Water flow to the reactor increased to counteract the lack of power and radiation building up which was trying to cool the system. The water created large

There have been lots of nuclear accident around the world. One of the accident that had a major impact on the world was the Chernobyl disaster. The disaster took place on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The disaster was caused by a reaction explosion induced by design faults and staff application errors. The accident took place in the course of scheduled tests to check the power supply mode in the event of external sources loss. Even after 10 days, explosions and ejections of radioactive substances continued. The release of radiation and radioactive substance polluted the places within 30 km of Chernobyl, and those areas have been closed for a long period of

In the Spring of 1986, the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen destroyed Chernobyl, Russia. The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear plant explosion that occurred when there was an unexpected power surge that the workers were trying to fix. The reason this is the worst nuclear disaster ever seen is because not only were there many casualties, but the health care costs were also very expensive for the country. It took a very long time to decontaminate the area and other parts of Europe which was very hard. This disaster was very impactful towards the mental and physical health of the residents, the environment of Chernobyl and the areas around it, and helped change the safety regulations and ways nuclear reactors are used today.

It has been nearly seven years since the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima, Japan. It was on March 11, 2011 when the pacific coast of Honshu, the largest island in Japan, was hit by a forceful earthquake of magnitude of 9.0 and following tsunami. The powerful waves came in all the way up to ten kilometers inland and the result was over twenty thousand people dead or missing and an enormous amount of vital infrastructure damage including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.1 There were six reactors operating in the region at the time and three of them reached full meltdown due to the failure of the cooling system caused mainly by the tsunami, releasing dozens of radioactive elements into the

Even though natural disasters, that occurred on March 11, 2011, were the actual cause for the reactor disaster in Fukushima, the government should have reacted sooner and prevented radiation from spreading and contaminating the region preventing any more deaths in humans or creatures. The Japanese Authorities are responsible for when and how radiation was spread out across the region; effect of radiation on the region of Fukushima and the ocean biome; prevention of radiation from spreading and contaminating more regions; and efforts to restore Fukushima and to remove radiation from the environment. I will be using these four segments to support my thesis, providing facts about these supports, and also making an arguable point for why and how the government may have lessened the effect of this disaster.

The worst accident was Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986 where a flawed reactor design resulted in a steam explosion. This explosion caused some of the core to be released into the air. Radiation poisoning was the main effect on human lives from the accident, causing a higher level of thyroid cancer. Over a lifetime, humans encounter radiation every day. X-rays and eating bananas also give off a very small amount of micro-Sieverts (units for the dosage of radiation). Nuclear waste has an impact on the environment and is dangerous to humans. Without proper storage or a new way to dispose of it, the waste is radioactive material and will not be irradiated until it is done decaying. Right now the United States stores the radioactive waste at the power plants around the country since funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was ended in

The actual causes of the accident itself was a faulty reactor, as well as technicians who were not fully trained (“Chernobyl,” 2016). This led to the discharge of a mixture of hazardous chemicals in an array of different forms that affected areas in one way or another depending on whether

Nuclear accidents have plagued nuclear power it 's very conception, and as thus tainted its name, and lead to bad publicity as being unsafe and dangerous. To focus on one incident, Chernobyl was one of the largest blunders in all of Nuclear history. Not only was miles around the plants irradiated, citizens and workers were exposed to higher levels of radiation, the workers even being developing acute radiation sickness. (NRC Backgrounder). After the initial incident, 18sq miles around the plant became the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and the area is not to be inhabitable for between 180 and 320 years (The Globe and Mail). It could have been prevented though. In the journal of Control, Béla Lipták writes, “Chernobyl Did Not Need To Occur” and examines the Chernobyl and views it as a act of human error, “The causes of this accident were similar to those at 3 Mile Island seven years earlier. Both of these accidents occurred at night, after a shift change of operators who were poorly trained, uninformed and were operating the plants under manual control while their safety controls were bypassed. […] The accident occurred while the reactor was being tested at low loading (20%) to determine the time period during which the plant would stay stable and continue to produce electricity after being shut down. The test was conducted in the middle of the night, by an inexperienced crew, while the control computer was disabled.” (Lipták) As one can see, it was a error in operation and

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant following an underwater earthquake that produced tsunamis, eventually resulting in a full nuclear meltdown and toxic amounts of radiation being dumped into the atmosphere. This particular nuclear disaster is infamous because, despite the earthquake and tsunami, it is still considered a man-made disaster. Had Fukushima plant workers been properly trained regarding what to do in the event of a nuclear disaster and had the Japanese government reacted more swiftly and efficiently, the damage to the reactors would have been less extensive and a full nuclear meltdown could have been prevented altogether. The factors that led to the meltdown, however, can be learned from and used to develop better safety procedures and educate people so that hopefully the next nuclear accident can be avoided in the future.

The Chernobyl incident continues to demonstrate the risks involved with nuclear power, as well as the consequences of any failure. Simple human error led to a chain reaction that caused the reactor core to melt down. The resulting explosion spewed clouds of radiation into the atmosphere that quickly spread. Kasperski states, “The explosion of reactor Unit 4 on April 26, 1986 led to heavy radioactive contamination of regions of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia” (Kasperski 44). With no way of containing the radiation, the toxic cloud quickly spread throughout Europe. Nazaryan explains, "The toxic cloud that enveloped much of Europe....contained: cesium-137, iodine-131, zirconium-95...." (Nazaryan 4). What made matters worse is that the public didn’t know about the accident until two days after the explosion occurred. This resulted in thousands of civilians unknowingly exposing themselves to potentially life-threatening levels of radiation. While the radioactive cloud eventually dispersed into the atmosphere, the same cannot be said about the radiation absorbed by the ground

On March 11th, 2011, the northern section of Japan was hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, followed by a 15 meter tsunami, causing the death of over 15000 people. (Spacey) Even though the earthquake and the tsunami caused a tremendous amount of deaths in the northern region of Japan, the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant caused a severe damage to northern Japan’s ecosystem that people still cannot go back to their homes; despite it is 4 years after the disaster. After the earthquake, the tsunami destroyed the power supply used by Fukushima’s three nuclear power stations, causing severe levels of meltdown to be occurred inside the reactors in the timespan of 3 days. It was not until 2 weeks after the tragedy, when the reactors were finally stabilized, and took several months to approach what is called a “cold shutdown condition”, in which the fission in the reactors are completely stopped.(Fukushima A)

Fukushima (Japan 2011) three of six nuclear reactors melted down after the plant was hit by a tsunami. There were no deaths or causes of radiation sickness from the accident, but over 100 000 people had to be evacuated to enable this. There is estimated to be over 1 000 deaths as a result of the evacuation.