1. Fukushima Overview

2. The Japanese experience with Nuclear Power
It began in the 1960s and expanded to providing 30% of electricity.
At least 100,000 people were evacuated and 30,000 may never return.

3. The Economist assignment of blame:
Poor regulation
Insufficient safety culture
Human error (without which the effects of the tsunami would have been very different)
The “nuclear village” of bureaucrats, politicians and industrialists allowed their enthusiasm for nuclear power to shelter weak regulations and safety systems that did not work.

4. They are guilty of being ignorant of the risk from teutonic systems which were faced by the reactors and in fostering a myth of nuclear safety.

5. Why Fukushima happened
The Economist for March 10, 2012 had an extended critique:
The 14 meter tsunami easily topped the inadequate defenses
All but one of the plant’s back-up diesel generators were flooded
The reactors had been shut down 40 minutes before the tsunami

6. While shutting down the reactors lowered the heat output by 97%, the remaining 3% in the absence of the generators or electricity from the grid caused the fuel in the reactor cores to get hot enough to melt
The cladding on the fuel rods reacted with steam to produce hydrogen
The systems that should have flushed the hydrogen out of the containment vessels failed

7. When three of the buildings had hydrogen explosions, radioactive material went well beyond the 20 kilometer evacuation zone

8. A Harsh Assessment Reactors were of an old design
The operating company was poorly regulated
Representatives of the safety inspectorate fled
Some equipment failed
The nuclear establishment played down risks and suppressed information about the radioactive plume

9. It could have been worse
There is a lot of used fuel in spent fuel ponds
If the hot fuel had been left high and dry by the explosion in Building 4, people as far away as Tokyo would have had to been evacuated