2021-03-10 Fukushima at 10 Presentation - What Happened and the Real Lessons for Energy Policy

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, I updated an earlier presentation with new material. (1.57M bytes)

I also created a text version of the presentation with the references and their links. (75.7k bytes)

After witnessing the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to phase out all its nuclear power plants by the end of 2022.
On 2021-03-09, I watched an online meeting marking the 10^th anniversary of Fukushima from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. (See: https://www.boell.de/en/startpage)
Mention was made of a presentation from Agora Energiewende – a think tank on German, European and international climate and energy policy. (See: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/).
This addresses 10 questions prompted by the nuclear phase-out, including whether it created an electricity shortfall, and whether it had increased carbon emissions.

The answers are ‘No’ in both cases – as may be seen from the presentation. (1.32M bytes)

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2021-03-10 Fukushima at 10 Presentation - What Happened and the Real Lessons for Energy Policy

The Fukushima disaster was aggravated by the personnel being responsible for multiple reactors under emergency conditions.

There had been no testing or drills of Station Blackouts and Loss of Cooling Accidents in the 40 years since the reactors were built.

Once reactor meltdowns and radioactive releases had occurred, they had no means of mapping the fallout to guide evacuation.

The later Abe government coerced ‘voluntary’ evacuees to return by stopping their housing subsidies after only six years. Many still resist returning, despite the hardships.

The Abe government also sought to restart the 39 remaining operable nuclear power plants, but succeeded with only a few. Nuclear power is still strongly resisted by most Japanese.

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