We were due to fly to Tokyo from Sydney last Wednesday, and I was determined to go anyway as our son David lives in Tokyo. We had then planned to go south to Hiroshima for a few days. The massive earthquake had spooked everyone in Tokyo as the strength of it was unprecedented. We have now been told that in the case of smallish quakes which happen all the time in Japan the shaking is sideways. However with this one the shaking was vertical and very strong, which is a signature for movements of the major plates. This vertical movement along the subduction zone generated the massive tsunami which then devastated the east coast. The nuclear plant at Fukushima got hit by a double whammy. The plant shut down correctly after the huge earthquake which damaged the building structure and the emergency cooling generators took over correctly, but then these were then wiped out by the tsunami. Nuclear accidents generate panic driven by media hype like nothing else and this unsettled the poor people of Tokyo. At midnight on Tuesday we got a phone call from Mayumi to say that she was being transferred to Hong Kong as their office had been damaged by the quake and that David would transfer as well. So at 2 am we changed flights to Hong Kong instead of Tokyo and noticed that the hotel rooms were fast running out in Hong Kong as ex-pats and others were exiting Tokyo. We booked one of the few remaining reasonably priced rooms for 11 nights at 3am.
When we arrived at the airport on Wednesday evening for our flight we learned that our original flight to Tokyo had been cancelled by Qantas seemingly because the aircrew were not willing to stop over in Tokyo. The hype continued as foreign governments urged their countrymen to leave Tokyo despite no radiation being detected. It turns out that one other reason for companies to transfer staff temporarily from Tokyo is the continuing power problems caused by the shutdown of several nuclear plants with many restaurants shut and trains disrupted to conserve power.
The knee jerk reaction of European countries and the US to this nuclear accident is silly and purely political, – Germany reviewing its nuclear policy etc. It is remarkable that all the modern nuclear plants in Japan survived this massive earthquake without problems with the only exception being the 40 year old Boiling Water Reactors at Fukushima. The main problem has been highlighted that spent fuel needs active cooling for several months even when all the power fails.
I can’t help feeling that humans behave irrationally like birds in flight driven by the media. It is a tribute to Japan that very little damage was done by such a huge earthquake in Tokyo itself. It is a tribute to Japan that everyone acted calmly without panic. The tsunami was a terrible blow, but undoubtably many people were actually saved by the advanced warning alarms and prepared evacuation drills. Likewise the nuclear emergency is being handled in a professional way by the Japanese engineers and firemen who are displaying immense courage and control. Today the power was reconnected to two reactors and only miniscule amounts of radioactivity have been detected away from the immediate area. We forget that in the 1960s the whole world’s atmosphere was polluted by nuclear fallout from Atomic bomb tests by the US, Britain and the USSR sufficient enough to have triggered the test ban treaty.
