Not just a crisis from cataclysm, but a crisis in trust.
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I’m writing this letter to anyone who’ll listen.
Its hard not to feel helpless these days. Helpless in the face of Japan’s suffering over the last 72 hours, which has been overwhelming: a 9.0 earthquake, a deadly tsunami and now the partial, though now apparently contained, meltdown of three of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s core reactors. A single event would be enough for any country to give pause but today, we’re talking three.
According to Japan’s prime minister (the equivalent of our president), what has happened is comparable to the devastation of World War II. The sophistication of Japan’s technology and infrastructure would, in relatively less catastrophic circumstances, allow the country to quickly recover from the devastation of an earthquake. Japanese expertise in seismic safety design is second to none in the world and here in the quake-ridden SF Bay Area, we rely on that expertise as crucial to our own continued safety.
In the aftermath of the Dec. 26, 2004 quake and tsunami, early (or earlier) warning systems were put in place for Pacific and Indian ocean nations. Japan’s death toll of 10,000 or more could have been a lot worse without the factors of Japan’s continually updated seismic safety technology and tsunami warning system, made relevant by what happened in Banda Aceh.
However, radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s core failure could still be breathing down our necks here in California and throughout the western U.S. Even though experts say the current core meltdown is only partial, that it’s contained and the radioactive particle dispersion is low, the repetitiveness of that reassurance makes me — after Three Mile Island, Indian Power Plant, Chernobyl and Deepwater Horizon — highly suspicious. With nuclear incidents, we have not just a crisis from cataclysm, but a crisis in trust. With limited information on the news and the measured words of government officials from the last 24 hours, it’s not hard to become a cynic.