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From Chernobyl to Fukushima Essay

Decent Essays

It’s a clear, cool, spring Friday afternoon. All were going about their quotidian business, in offices, on trains, in rice fields, in stores, in schools, in warehouses, in shrines then, the ground began to shake. Located at Pacific fault lines, Japanese are accustomed to these shudder and shakes but something was different on March 11th. Moments later a low rumble from the east came, the Pacific Ocean. People began to see a ragged white line in the horizon, within minutes a monstrous wall of waves came sweeping in, clawing across the land destroying everything in its path. If that wasn’t enough, a nuclear accident arose after a power plant was struck. Nightmares within two minutes turned into reality. Only debris remained where homes, …show more content…

So, when a tsunami comes inland at the speed of a jetliner there is no chance, it will catch you, it will drown you, and its forces will pulverize you. Even worse than geography and topography is geological history. Japan alone has had more than a dozen earthquakes in the past three and half years (Allen). In February there was a destructive earthquake in New Zealand, and an even more violent one in Chile almost a year before. All three earthquakes involved the same Pacific fault lines and plated boundaries. (Winchester) What does this mean for the future of Japan?
Albert Einstein quoted, “the release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.” (Famous) The human species foolishly has made the decision to use nuclear power, first used sixty-six years ago, also in Japan, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The power of nuclear energy is beyond our control therefore should not be used. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are things regularly go wrong and have done so in Japan. The problem isn’t that another backup generator is needed or that safety rules aren’t tight enough. It is that imperfect creatures like ourselves are unfit to use the stellar fire released from a split

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