From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Prologue to catastrophe
Abstract
In this article, a worker at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station gives his eyewitness account of what happened there on March 11, 2011, in the immediate wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station's reactor cores to melt.
From the account:
I first felt the earthquake as I walked from the vicinity of Units 5 and 6 - which are located near the ocean to the site's entrance gate. Suddenly, the asphalt began to ripple, and I couldn't stay on my feet. In a panic, I looked around and saw a 120-meter exhaust duct shaking violently and looking like it would rupture at any second. Cracks began to appear on the outside of Unit 5's turbine building and on the inside of the entryway to the unit's service building. The air was filled with clouds of dirt.
When the shaking subsided, more than 200 workers, who had been on the ocean side of the plant, came rushing to the gate. To protect the facility, anyone entering or leaving by the gate had to pass through a metal detector.
"Let us out of here," we yelled. "A tsunami may be coming!" Screams and shouts filled the air.
"Wait for instructions from the radiation safety group," demanded a security guard.
This response angered the workers. When an earthquake had struck the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant [in 2007], some workers had jumped over the gate to flee - and they were later charged for having "broken the law."
After keeping us waiting for a few minutes, the guard collected our APDs [alarm-equipped pocket radiation meters] and our ID cards and instructed that we "all seek refuge." I headed for the earthquake-resistant building; however, when I arrived, a ruptured ground pipe was spraying water like a geyser and had caused a mudslide that covered the stairs - which, from top to bottom, spanned some 20 to 30 meters. When I reached the operational headquarters, numerous windows on the second floor had shattered, and the blinds were flapping about in the wind. Three or four cooling towers on the roof had either fallen or were tilted over. Considering that the walls of the newly constructed Units 5 and 6 had been damaged, I figured that Units 1 through 4, which were older, must have been in even worse shape.
The Crisis Center on the second floor was jam-packed. As we watched the news on TV, we were first worried about the Onagawa Nuclear Plant. NHK News showed aerial helicopter footage of a tsunami hitting fields in Natori City in Miyagi Prefecture [in northeastern Japan, where the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant is located, more than 200 miles from Tokyo]. But then a section chief came rushing up to Fukushima's plant manager, Masao Yoshida, and reported: "A tank [has] been washed away and had sunk into the ocean."
We all went pale with shock: The tank that had been lost was a surge tank of suppression pool water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
An amazing story -- how something as huge as a power generation plant could be brought down by the earthquake and the tsunami. The joke of the matter is that while they were worried about the status of the Onagawa Power Plant, that Plant had withstood the earthquake so well that it was serving as a refuge for the entire town. The Onagawa plant was built to withstand bigger tsunamis - 30 feet (9 meters) - than Fukushima's 18 feet (5.4 meters). It's first reactor came online June 1, 1984, Fukushima March 26, 1971. Only thirteen years separating the two but a world of engineering differences. It can be done right and be safe. Other designs (Thorium/molten salt) are intrinsically safe and can not melt down. I remember the night when the news came in -- I subscribe to an Earthquake email list and received notification just before midnight on March 10th.
