A strong earthquake struck Fukushima late Wednesday evening (local time). Japan’s Meteorological Agency issues tsunami warning for prefectures fukushima And out Miyagi.
It was not initially known whether there was damage to the nuclear ruins at Fukushima. Wednesday’s quake was also felt in Tokyo, some 300 kilometers away. Broadcaster NHK initially gave a strength of 7.3. There was also a brief power outage in some parts of Tokyo. The weather agency has warned of a one meter high tidal wave.
A massive earthquake in the northeast suddenly evoked memories of the catastrophic devastation of almost eleven years ago: on March 11, 2011, about 130 km northeast of Japan’s east coast, a severe oceanic earthquake occurred at a depth of about 32 km. Sendai city. It was the strongest earthquake in the country’s history with a magnitude of 9.0.
The tidal wave that followed flooded large parts of the coastal area, devastated the entire region and killed about 20,000 people. The power of the water masses swallows up cities, destroys roads and infrastructure, and sinks ships inland.
but that’s not all. Because here, on the coast, everywhere, is the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Water washes out in the system, the power supply is interrupted, the cooling fails.
On 12 March, Block 1 suffered a nuclear meltdown, followed by Blocks 2 and 3. The building shells of blocks 1-4 were destroyed. Radioactivity comes out. About 160,000 residents had to leave the area temporarily or permanently, and hundreds of thousands of animals left on the farms died of starvation.
The event had consequences for energy policy around the world: in Germany, for example, the federal government, under the guise of mass protest, rolled back the recently decided extension of the lifetime of large-scale nuclear power plants. Got it. Eight of the then 17 nuclear power plants had to be removed from the grid immediately and forever.
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