At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake with a magnitude 9.0 hit off the coast of Miyagi prefecture, and subsequently triggered a gigantic tsunami which was reported to be more than 10 to 20m in height. The tsunami devastated a large number of towns and villages located along the coastline of the northeastern part of Japan. To date (Mar. 29, 2011), 27,000 people are confirmed to be death or lost, and 0.17 million people are still at evacuation centers.
I would like to express my greatest sympathy to the families of the people who died or were lost in the incident. In addition, I hope that the devastated area will be recovered in an adequate manner.
On the other hand, the tsunami triggered another tragedy in Fukushima. Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was struck by the unexpected scale of the tsunami, and the plant lost its cooling system completely. In spite of extraordinary efforts conducted so far by the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant is going out of control, and releasing a huge amount of radioactive substances into the environment, including the atmosphere and seawater. Although the Japanese government announced that the severity of this incident was equivalent to the Three Mile Island accident, some scientists estimated that the total amount of radioactive substances released so far is rather closer to that of Chernobyl.
I cannot be an optimist with respect to the ongoing nuclear crisis. What I can (or want to) do now is to grasp the risk arising from this crisis, and inform the surrounding people of the risk and its background information with understandable vocabulary. Scientific knowledge and good communication skills are needed at this moment.
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