Detailed Report: Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Its Lessons Learned

This report examines the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, and the subsequent nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The disaster resulted in significant loss of life, infrastructure damage, and economic losses, leading to the closure of all nuclear power plants in ...Read More

Student’s name
Tittle
Lecturer’s name
Date

SIRNAME 2
On the 11th day of March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami stroke a
humanitarian disaster in the North-East of Japan. This disaster initiated a severe nuclear accident
at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In the plant, half of the six main reactors sustained
damages that lead to hydrogen and radioactive substance leakage in the atmosphere. As a result,
the released hydrogen exploded, damaging three reactor buildings hindering every effort of the
emergency response to controlling the damage. This incident was responsible for more than 15,
700 deaths, and over 2,100 people went missing. Besides, “there was severe damage to the
physical infrastructure that exceeded $300 billion”1. For this reason, significant economic losses,
widespread evacuation of the local population, and abrupt closure of all the nuclear power plants
in Japan became the immediate response to solving the crisis.
At the occurrence of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, the Blue Ribbon Commission of
the American Nuclear Future was in as assessment process on how to manage and spend nuclear
fuel and high-level radioactive wastes in the United States. A commission recommended that the
National Academy of Science conduct research and then come up with life lessons well scripted
from the accident2. These recommendations were then forwarded to the United States congress to
verify and shed more light on some of the necessary precautions. Concerning how to handle the
radioactive plans and minimize the chances of their breakdown.
A bold and remarkable step was taken by the Fukushima Daiichi plant personnel, who
responded with a lot of resilience in the course of the accident. This, to some extent, managed a
significant magnitude of the spread of radioactive materials. Due to excessive leakage and
1 Chaochun, Huang, Juneyuan Huang, and Mingte Hsu. "Lessons Learned from
Fukushima—Applied to Emergency Preparedness in Taiwan." In International Conference
Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference, (Springer, Singapore, 2016), 387.
2 Ashraf, Labia, and M. J. Harris. "Learning how to learn from failures: The Fukushima
nuclear disaster" (Engineering Failure Analysis 2015), 119.

SIRNAME 3
several other factors, “the personnel in the scene could not manage the process.” The following
are some of the lessons learned from the event:
 The plant operators should be able to take timely actions to implement the
countermeasures should such an incident take the course in a nuclear plant;
 There should be a robust integrated emergency procedure, severe accident management
guidelines, and extensive damage mitigation guidelines to lead the damage control;
process.
 The operators should be trained on specific emergency protocols, such as how to shut
down the reactors safely. As well, operators should receive general training in
understanding the effects of the nuclear plant system design to manage an emergency
occurrence;
 The communication channel should be kept open for all departments and especially the
emergency department. The incident that occurred happened due to the failure of
transmitting information in a timely and accurate manner hence worsening the situation;
 The plant should clearly define roles and responsibilities within the onsite emergency
response center and between the onsite and headquarter response center as their delay in
responding to the emergency call facilitated the severity of the damage; and
 The plant should hire enough staff who can effectively manage the accidents, especially
in the reactor units, for a prolonged time. During the accident breakout, only a few
dedicated personnel (staff) responded to the emergency call, but because they were few,
“they could not manage to control the situation.”

SIRNAME 4
Bibliography
Huang, Chaochun, Juneyuan Huang, and Mingte Hsu. "Lessons Learned from Fukushima—
Applied to Emergency Preparedness in Taiwan." In International Conference Pacific
Basin Nuclear Conference, pp. 385-397. Springer, Singapore, 2016.
Kawamura, Shinichi, and Tadashi Narabayashi. "A study on resilience management of nuclear
power plants based on the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident." (2017).
Labia, Ashraf, and M. J. Harris. "Learning how to learn from failures: The Fukushima nuclear
disaster." Engineering Failure Analysis 47 (2015): 117-128.
Power, Nuclear. "Training Workshop on the Development of Severe Accident Management
Guidelines Using the IAEA's Severe Accident Management Guideline Development
Toolkit." (2017).