Friday Sept. 30, 2011
THEN On Sept. 30, 1999, workers at a nuclear fuel processing plant in Japan accidentally add 35 pounds of powdered uranium to nitric acid instead of just the 5 pounds. Workers at the Ibaraki Prefecture plant see a flash of blue light. The reaction releases a great quantity of gas containing alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. The high concentration of uranium triggers a fission reaction that takes nearly 20 hours for officials to bring under control. That day officials evacuate 160 people who all live within a quarter of a mile of the facility. Officials order another 310,000 people living within six miles of the plant to stay indoors with windows shut until radiation levels fell. One plant worker, Hisashi Ouchi, dies after two weeks in a coma. NOW This past March Japan’s worst nuclear catastrophe occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant south of Ibaraki Prefecture. With cooling systems knocked out by the tsunami that struck after the magnitude-9 earthquake, fuel in three of the plant’s six reactors exploded and melted through the containment vessels releasing untold amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and surrounding region. The nuclear reactors at the plant are still in the process of being shut down. On Thursday evening Sept. 29, a magnitude-5.4 earthquake struck Fukushima Prefecture, but as of Thursday night there were no official reports of more damage to the plant. A Japanese radiology expert calculated that the radiation fallout of Fukushima is 30 times greater than that released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
