GOING NUCLEAR

Some climate activists are giving atomic energy a second look. Should they?

- ELIZABETH KOLBERT

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, when the Tōhoku earthquake, also known as the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Great Sendai Earthquake, struck the island of Honshu. The shock, which registered 9.1 on the Richter scale, was so powerful that it knocked the island eight feet closer to Hawaii and generated a tsunami that sloshed all the way to Antarctica.

That afternoon, three of Fukushima’s six reactors were up and running; the other three were down for maintenance. The quake tripped the plant’s emergency-response system, and control rods were automatically inserted into the fuel as-semblies in the units numbered one, two, and three. Even so, the reactors continued to give off heat. When the tsunami hit, about forty-five minutes later, it flooded the plant’s backup generators, along with the batteries that were supposed to back up the backups. As a result, Fukushima’s cooling pumps failed. Within hours, the temperature inside Nuclear reactors were once a symbol of menace; now they’ve been repositioned as a necessary alternative to fossil fuels. Unit 1 rose to five thousand degrees, and the fuel assembly started to melt down. Everyone living within a mile and a half of the plant was ordered to evacuate.