The Fukushina Disaster - Research Paper Example

The disaster happened in Japan which has one of the worlds most sophisticated nuclear engineers, technicians and scientist and despite this expertise, the disaster still happened. My gut is nagging me that if this could happen in Japan with all that expertise about Nuclear Power, it could be worst elsewhere in the world. I really would like to know because the coverage last year was limited where employees and the company involved (TEPCO) did not publicly talked about what really happened inside the plant that left many questions unanswered.

The assignment and the video provided an excellent opportunity for me to satisfy that curiosity. Perhaps the essense of the video is best encapsulated by Fukushim Daichi’s nuclear engineer “that they could not imagine that a nuclear plant would lose all its power” in the same manner that they did not expect that a nuclear power plant could be vulnerable to tsunami. But it did anyway and their options became restricted. The tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daichi plant was twice high its tsunami walls and so it flooded the plant.

In effect, it destroyed the generators that were located in the basement who were supposed to provide power to cool the nuclear reactor when the regular power shut down due to the earthquake. In sum, everything that happened in Fukushima that led to the disaster was unexpected; from the tsunami that got twice as high their protective walls (TEPCO was warned by government commissioned scientists in 2009 that their protective walls were inaduate from tsunami) to the breaking down of the generators that were supposed to cool down the reactor.

In the end, they were left The account was dramatic and very engaging because the information that were presented were not from secondary sources. The people behind the documentary can be lauded because it was able to interview the people who manually vent out the radiation. It also included the Prime Minister who provided candid answers to the questions. Also, the documentary was able to present the ugly dilemma that the Prime Minister had to decide on, to give permission to release or vent radiation in the atmosphere.

Everybody knew that the vent out has to be done to ease the pressure in the nuclear containment to avoid explosion that will have a far more damaging effect that could last up to decades. Only that the Prime Minister has to decide and even has to go to the plant himself to give the order when he suspected that the executives of TEPCO were hiding the truth from him. It is an ugly decision that he has to make but he has to because the safety, health and future of his country is at stake. Still, even when the nuclear pressure was released, plant 1 of the Nakaigichi plant still exploded which sent chills to everybody’s spine (plant 3 also exploded laer).

The relief only came when the containment was still intact that the explosion was caused by a hydrogen leak and not from a nuclear meltdown. The drama and dilemma that the video has more than adequately presented led me to think about the option of using nuclear plant as a source of energy. It led me to think about many things that is connected not only with the plant, but also on the various sources of energy, on how can we limit our dependency to