Five lessons from Fukushima

This article was published in Spiked Oline 16 March 2011

Alarmist talk of a nuclear crisis in Japan reveals just how fearful modern society has become.

The world’s media has spent the past four days obsessing about one thing. No, not the deaths of thousands of people in Japan after the terrible combination of an earthquake and tsunami, with whole towns simply wiped out. Instead, the focus has been on what might happen at a Japanese nuclear power plant where no one has died, so far, and where the likelihood of serious harm seems remote.

Here are five lessons we really should learn from Fukushima:

1. Fukushima is not Chernobyl
The world’s worst nuclear accident, which occurred in April 1986 in the former Soviet Union (in what is now northern Ukraine) was utterly different from what is happening at the moment in Japan. The only connection is that Chernobyl and Fukushima are nuclear power plants. In Chernobyl, a safety test on an operating reactor went horribly wrong, leading to an explosion that exposed the reactor core. A fire burned for several days, lifting tons of radioactive material high into the air to spread over Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, with significant quantities carried over most of the rest of Europe.