Nuclear Fukushima Daichi Incident

I`m sure almost everyone was in great shock upon receiving the news, first the tsunami that struck northeastern part of Japan, then followed by worst incident after Chernobyl 1986 of nuclear reactor Fukushima Daichi which become crippled soon after the tsunami swept away the back up generator. I was at my hometown, Wakaf Bharu, when the rare incident (nuclear disaster) took place. When I first read about the Tsunami on Saturday from local newspaper, I just shot a short glance at news about Japanese checking on condition of the nuclear reactor. It didn`t across my mind that this problem could be getting worse, as it is, now. Subhanallah, if Allah wills, anything can and will happen. Even if the best technology was deployed (I`m not saying here the crippled reactor was the best nuclear technology...rather it was 40-year old technology from US!)

What happened was, the tsunami which followed suit the 8.9 richter earthquake knocked out the back up generator at Fukushima Daichi plant. Well, back up generator serves a critical function of providing cooling water system to the reactor when power supply from grid is cut off. So basically once it becomes unavailable, engineers are left with very limited ways of cooling the decayed heat that amounted inside the reactor. The fission reaction has halted when the control rod dropped as what should be happening when an earthquake struck. However, decay heat was still being generated from fission products and need to be cooled down. This failure to cool down the reactor would result in fuel meltdown, be it partial or full. We really want to avoid this as meltdown can cause radioactivity release to the environment if the containment building is breached. In this incident, at least reactor 2 and 3, their containment building have been breached, even if it`s not near the same scale as Chernobyl incident. And news has been circulated around that that much higher dose of radiation than legally permissible amount spotted in few places. Right now, engineers are still working round the clock to bring power back to the plant and restore the cooling system. Prior to this, they even resorted to use seawater for cooling.  There was even a photo on newspaper showing a helicopter scooping sea water to be poured onto the hobbled reactors. How desperate they were! 

The latest news that I received was that the effort to restore cooling system back to operation has to be suspended after the water has filled up the tunnel which I believe houses the cable and other equipment related to cooling system, which making it too unsafe for workers to enter it and do the repair. . The water is contaminated with radioactive elements and hence is very dangerous. Government of Japan is now reported to be in maximum alert over the crippled plant. It is also reported that they plutonium has been detected in soil sample taken from soil near the plant. Plutonium poses much more harm to human compared to Iodine -131.The latter has half life for only 8 days whereby the former can reside up to decades inside one`s body and expose organs and tissue to radiation and the risk of cancer. 

My heart goes to Japanese and I pray that they will be able to contain this accident from getting worse. However, much has been said that Japanese government did an exemplary act in tackling and handling this matter. You know, what a daunting task it is to manage earthquake victims, then tsunami , then nuclear disaster, and yet they got through this very well, a hat`s off to them. A photo from local newspaper showed that how in dire situation, Japanese still heed to police`s instruction to line up to get food. The discipline never plunge even in this pressure. I truly admire this!