One year on: the lessons of Fukushima On the first anniversary
of the Japanese tsunami, Rob Lyons asks why some fairly minor
damage to one nuclear plant became the story. Sunday marks the
first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated
the east coast of Japan on 11 March 2011. The quake, measuring
9.0 on the Richter scale, was the biggest ever to hit Japan and
one of the biggest anywhere in the world in the past century.
The resulting tsunami caused roughly 20,000 deaths. Yet,
shockingly, the biggest issue about the disaster remains the
resulting inundation of a nuclear-power plant at Fukushima,
which so far appears to have caused precisely zero deaths from
leaking radioactivity. There are many valuable lessons to be
learned from this tragedy. One is the importance of development.
The earthquake and tsunami that affected the Indian Ocean on
Boxing Day 2004 were only marginally larger, yet killed well
over 200,000 people. Direct damage from the Japan earthquake was
relatively small thanks to hi