Fukushima: ten years on from the disaster, was Japan’s response right?

Payne Institute Fellow William Nuttall and Philip Thomas write about how the world saw something never before caught on camera on March 12, 2011: an explosion ripping the roof off a nuclear power plant – Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. The blast wasn’t actually nuclear, it was the result of hot hydrogen gas encountering the cool, outside air during the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. But the distinction hardly mattered – something had clearly gone terribly wrong.  In order to minimise suffering in future nuclear accidents, there are important lessons from March 2011 that must be learned.  March 10, 2021.