Fukushima's Decade-Long Shadow Made Nuclear Safer

摘要

Koji Okamoto, director general of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency's (JAEA's) Collaborative Laboratories for Advanced Decommissioning Science (CLADS), can pinpoint the specific moment that cemented his calling. Ten years ago, he was a University of Tokyo nuclear engineering professor working on nuclear safety measures as part of a government council. He was on a business trip in the UK when he first learned a 3-minute, magnitude 9.0 temblor had rocked Japan's eastern coast on March 11, 2011, inundating it with a series of tsunami waves as tall as 38.9 meters (130 feet). The next day, though his business took him to Germany, he watched aghast on television as the crisis amplified into a nuclear emergency at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s (TEPCO's) six-unit Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Station, and prompted the first hydrogen explosion at Unit 1, severely damaging its reactor building.