Current Event 5
3.21.12
Over a year after the disaster, the results are still being analyzed. On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by an earthquake. This disaster destroyed building, roads, and bridges, and it killed 16,000 people. It also destroyed reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The next day, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) urged Americans within a fifty mile radius of the nuclear reactor to evacuate the area for their safety. Nuclear power plants are surrounded by two emergency planning zones developed out of accident analyses conducted in the 1960s and 1970s: a roughly 10-mile radius around the plant that must anticipate being exposed to a and a roughly 50-mile radius around the plant that must prepare for possibly being exposed to radioactive particles that drop out of a plume. Neither are zones that are fixed and that is the absolute boundary, explains the NRC's Patricia Milligan, the senior technology advisor for preparedness and response in the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response. "We don't expect that nuclear power plant operators would stop taking action because it's at 10.5 miles. The plans are built so that 10 miles provides a reasonable basis and, if you need to expand, you could. That happened in the Fukushima case. Hours after the tsunami hit Japan on March 11, the Japanese government ordered an for the people living within a three kilometer of the reactors to evacuate. They also told those living within a ten kilometer to stay in their homes and keep their doors and windows shut. But as the situation became worse, they expanded the evacuation area. Even though it's gotten quite bad, the government only makes the rules of evacuation based on previous earned data. In the United States alone, more than four million Americans live within 10 miles of 63 nuclear power plants, which have at least one working reactor. This number grows to 180 million Americans if you extend it to a 50 mile radius, and it includes some large cites, such as West Palm Beach, Florida, Philadelphia, and San Diego. In the case of Fukushima, there were at least 14 hours between the loss of electricity to power the pumps keeping cooling water on the nuclear fuel and a . In nonnuclear emergencies, such as the release of toxic gases, only minutes may pass before catastrophe hits. "When there's conditions immediately dangerous to life and health, you don't have hours, you have significantly less time than that to get people out of the way of chlorine gas or a wildfire," Milligan said.
I still feel bad for Japan, and even though this disaster happened over a year ago, they are still looking at the destruction. Then when I heard the facts about the sixty-three nuclear power plants in the United States, I became scared. There millions of Americans living next to these disasters waiting to happen. The four million people within the ten mile radius could be hurt, and the 180 million Americans within a fifty mile radius would have to evacuate. Even from smaller disasters, people would have to be relocated. But trying to evacuate 180 million people, that seems like a lot. Just thinking about the harm that the nuclear reactors caused makes me worry about the future of the sixty-three nuclear power plants in the United States. It also makes me wonder how long it will take the United States government to make an evacuation plan. It took the Japanese government fourteen hours to make an evacuation plan. Hopefully, it wont take our government as long, but I still see it being a while. I do think that our government should make evacuation plans in advance, to reduce the time it takes to come up with one in a disaster. I just hope that no other tragedy and disaster will come forward in the near future.
Biello, David. "It's Not Just Fukushima: Mass Disaster Evacuations Challenge Planners." 2012. Yahoo.com. Thursday April 12, 2012 <http://news.yahoo.com/not-just-fukushima-mass-disaster-evacuations-challenge-planners-160100287.html>.