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Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster

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Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster

By: Susan Stranahan, David Lochbaum, The Union of Concerned Scientists, Edwin Lyman
Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
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About this listen

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake large enough to knock the earth from its axis sent a massive tsunami speeding toward the Japanese coast and the aging and vulnerable Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactors. Over the following weeks, the world watched in horror as a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe: fail-safes failed, cooling systems shut down, nuclear rods melted.

In the first definitive account of the Fukushima disaster, two leading experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Lochbaum and Edwin Lyman, team up with journalist Susan Q. Stranahan, the lead reporter of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Pulitzer Prizewinning coverage of the Three Mile Island accident, to tell this harrowing story. Fukushima combines a fast-paced, riveting account of the tsunami and the nuclear emergency it created with an explanation of the science and technology behind the meltdown as it unfolded in real time.

The narrative also extends to other severe nuclear accidents to address both the terrifying question of whether it could happen elsewhere and how such a crisis can be averted in the future.

©2014 Union of Concerned Scientists (P)2014 Audible Inc. Asia Disaster Relief Engineering Environment Japan Politics & Government Science Social Sciences United States World Natural Disaster Imperial Japan
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enjoyable book, good analysis and makes you think about what we need to do to ensure nuclear power is safe.

great read

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This books goes into the decisions made by the government and nuclear regulators in Japan, the decisions on where to locate the reactors, as well as insights into the disaster. If you're after a book specifically on the events of the day and post disaster efforts then this isn't the book for you. Excellent narration, lots of background information, a must read if you are interested in this disaster.

Excellent review of the background of the disaster

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Any serious attempt to enlighten us with regard to Nuclear safety requirements is a good thing, and the ‘concerned scientists’ contributing this book do it well. But IMHO the issue is ‘priority’ in a world hurtling towards murderous Climate Change. I’ve done my part to accelerate today’s Climate change dramas by pushing back on Nuclear power for at least twenty of my sixty-eight years. I was deaf to greenhouse gasses and the thousands of fossil fuel deaths annually. Plutonium production for bombs and waste that lasts millennia, not to mention meltdown potential made my know-all arrogant behaviour unyielding. But today the elephant-in-the-room is that minus fossil fuels, only nuclear can deliver the roughly 50% of electricity and industrial heat that no amount of solar, wind, batteries, hydro and geo can do anytime soon. This book describes how today’s 400-odd reactors have serious potential problems due to unforeseen ‘worst case scenarios’, focusing on Fukushima because unlike Chernobyl, it is similar in many ways to most of the world’s present reactors. Not mentioned in the book is that Nuclear power/kwHr generated remains the safest of every kind of power generation including solar, wind etc despite every nuclear calamity mentioned. Today’s new 3rd generation reactors such as Westinghouse’s AP1,000 (Advanced Passive 1GW) introduce a form of ‘walk away safety’ (at least for several days) as do ‘small modular reactors’ while remaining high pressure water reactor with the considerable safety related costs that come with that. The small modular reactors (<300Mw) are ‘factory-made’ and transportable, saving costs considerably. For better or worse people need to hear that something has radically changed to make Nuclear safe and IMHO that will be difficult without embracing 4th generation ‘Molten Salt Reactors’ (MSRs) such as, but not limited to, Thorium. About six MSR designs are well under way and all are inherently passive ‘walk away safe’, running near atmospheric pressure where no massive safety container building is required. Thorium is virtually free and utilised to about 98% compared to 0.7% in today’s Uranium235 solid fuel reactors. That means that MSRs generate about 99% less waste with a 300-year half-life, which is nearly an order of magnitude earlier than today’s waste. MSRs run at atmospheric pressure and 600-700 degrees C making electrical generation more efficient (up to 45% vs about 33% with today’s 300 degree C steam turbines). MSRs can directly providing industrial heat where today fossil fuels generate about 20% of all green house gasses. This heat can also be used for water desalination and creating replacement chemicals that presently require fossil fuel products. MSRs are hopeless at creating bomb materials such as Plutonium but excellent for making a wide range of medical isotopes. The MSRE Molten Salt Reactor Experiment) was built in the sixties at Oak Ridge and run flawlessly for four years. When they were about to build and demonstrate the world’s safest nuclear electric generator Nixon pulled development funding because high-pressure water reactors had the momentum (nuclear engineers had been taught nothing about MSR technology), they were great for making bomb ingredients and would employ lots of people where Nixon needed votes. Fortunately the vast collection of research documents produced at Oak Ridge have been rescued and published on the internet by Kirk Sorensen. MSRs are coming slowly but surely to solve the vast majority of concerning issues in this exhausting but exhaustive book. Only three stars for not mentioning MSRs nor even mentioning the existential catastrophe Climate Change guarantees that only Nuclear can mitigate in the necessary time frame.

Nuclear or Climate Armageddon

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If anyone is truly interested in learning about the complete story behind either the Fukashima or Chernobyl disasters, then Andrew Leatherbarrow's books are more enlightening as they delve more into the culture and politics of the people involved at the time and place and why their respective governing bodies at the time failed to provide the necessary infastructure to avert a disaster that could have been eaisly avoided.

Union Of Concerned Scientists ?

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.