Japan's Nuclear Disaster Heats Up

There was another disturbing announcement coming out of Japan this week, adding even more bad news to the already serious environmental disaster that began in March of 2011, when a 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami destroyed the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.  Japan is no longer in a position to keep the promises made in 2010 by the previous government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, which escalates global warming.  The harmful effects to our environment caused by an increase in greenhouse gas emissions are producing an alarming crisis of climate change.  Many environmental scientists agree that this “makes extreme weather events, possibly including the devastating typhoon that hit the Philippines last week, more severe and more frequent” (Tabuchi, 2013). 

This announcement coincides with international talks taking place in Warsaw this week being led by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in an attempt to reach a global agreement on reducing the ever-increasing threat of a changing climate.  Japan is one of the top five polluters in the world, and their goal had been to lower emissions a full 25 percent from what it was in 1990, and now they estimate the rate will probably increase to about three percent by 2020.  However, in just one year without nuclear power, from March 2012 through March 2013, Japan’s rate of carbon dioxide emissions has been measured at fourteen percent higher than it was in 1990.  All of Japan’s fifty nuclear reactors have been shutdown since the earthquake and tsunami damaged four out of the six reactors at Fukushima, resulting in a massive nuclear meltdown and explosions that released radioactive material into the atmosphere. 

Unfortunately, because Japan had been relying on nuclear power to provide thirty percent of its total power needs, and because they had not developed other renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power, they have no other options besides making this grim announcement, and to go on polluting our environment.  In order to make up for the energy deficit created by taking all of its nuclear power plants offline, Japan has been forced to rely on other sources of energy.  They have been importing more fossil fuels and restarting old power stations that run on either coal or gas.  Now, Japan is releasing more carbon dioxide into the environment, increasing the possibility of even more catastrophic events like Typhoon Haiyan that killed thousands of people in the Philippines and left possibly millions without shelter, food, or safe water. 

TEPCO cut corners when it built the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and is another example of an irresponsible and greedy corporation that was left unregulated and unwatched, allowing it to do whatever was most profitable at the time.  Despite the fact that it sits right on the coast of Japan, in a part of the world prone to earthquakes, safety measures were severely deficient, including a seawall designed to hold back waves up to only about nineteen feet that had no chance of keeping the tsunami, which rose to an estimated 46 feet, from crashing down over the entire site.  Now, we are all paying the price for what TEPCO failed to do when it built the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

References

Tabuchi, H. and Jolly, D. (2013, November 15). Japan backs off from emissions targets, citing Fukushima disaster. The New York Times. Retrieved November 15, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/world/asia/japan-backs-off-from-emissions-targets.html

Fackler, M. (2011, June 1). Report finds Japan underestimated tsunami danger. The New York Times. Retrieved September 2, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/world/asia/02japan.html