force of the earthquake he said I had never experienced anything like it 1 It lasted five or six minutes The magnitude 9 0 earthquake was one of the strongest ever recorded Thousands of miles away it caused water to slosh in Norway’s fjords and ice in Antarctica to crack It shoved Japan about 8 feet 2 4 meters east and it even changed the way Earth spins Sensors at the plant triggered the automatic shutdown of fission inside Fukushima Daiichi’s three active reactors units 1 2 and 3 When the earthquake cut off electricity to the plant generators switched on to keep lights and equipment running Yoshizawa joined manager Masao Yoshida in the plant’s earthquake-proof bunker They determined that the plant’s employees were safe and the 40-year-old plant was undamaged The devastating tsunami that followed the magnitude 9 0 earthquake carried boats far inland But the jolting plates had disturbed the ocean Large waves were traveling away from the epicenter of the earthquake They approached Japan’s coast at 100 mph 160 kph Almost an hour after the earthquake they surged up to 6 miles 10 km inland Former Fukushima resident Ryo Kanouya remembered the soup of seawater cars houses and everything the tsunami carried 2 The waves
flooded 216 square miles 560 square km killing almost 20,000 people Inside the windowless bunker Yoshizawa heard reports of the destruction and couldn’t imagine a tsunami that big 3 he said later The plant’s designers hadn’t imagined it either To withstand earthquakes they had built Fukushima Daiichi on solid rock But when crews dug away 27 yards 25 m of soil before construction they put the plant within easy reach of tsunami waves At 3 42 p m the first of seven waves struck the plant One was more than 50 feet 15 m high more than twice the height of the plant’s seawalls The huge oncoming tsunami hit Japan with tremendous force sweeping away everything in its path Lights went out and machines went silent Tsunami waves had flooded basements destroying generators and electrical circuits Plant engineer Takeyuki Inagaki later remembered a terrifying situation And the operators weren’t sure what was happening We couldn’t even tell if there was water in the nuclear reactors 4 Water did not belong around the plant’s electronics Yet it was essential inside reactors Electric pumps normally circulate water through the reactor containers to keep fuel rods from overheating Even after fission is shut down hot fuel rods
need up to 24 hours to cool Without working pumps to replace water that’s boiling away to steam fuel rods heat so much that they can melt together This molten mass can burn through the protective container releasing life-threatening radiation into the air Meltdown is a nuclear plant worker’s nightmare Rushing around the dark control room with flashlights workers shared a single concern Were the fuel rods safe Without working gauges no one knew Plant manager Yoshida scrambled to make a plan What was happening was beyond what we trained for on a daily basis 5 a plant worker later explained He called it a race against time Workers collected car batteries to hook up to gauges Around 9 p m instruments came weakly to life with alarming news The water level inside unit 1 normally 20 feet 6 m above the fuel rods had dropped to just inches Meanwhile pressure soared as steam and gas filled the reactor vessel Unit 1 was a time bomb Yoshida planned to relieve the pressure the way a whistling teapot releases steam through a small opening Winds would carry radioactive steam over towns But an explosion inside the reactor vessel would release far more radiation Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan ordered anyone living within 6 miles 10 km of the plant to evacuate People abandoned their search for loved ones in the tsunami-wrecked zone to flee a wave of radiation
The epicenter of the earthquake was 80 miles 129 km off the east coast of Japan Venting the reactor vessel is easy if the plant has electricity Workers simply open valves remotely from the control room On Saturday morning workers wearing gas masks and head-to-toe protective suits entered the reactor building to open valves by hand Yoshida feared that his men were a suicide squad 6 Their dosimeters machines to measure radiation registered shockingly high radiation levels Workers struggled with a valve and by midafternoon steam leaked from unit 1’s exhaust tower Just an hour later relief turned to panic As the container’s heat spiked to
