After writing hurriedly on 13 March on the great Quake and tsunami which hit the whole of Eastern Japan two days earlier, I went on a travel out of the country from 14 to 28th. I am going to write about them in the next few blogs. But now what I noticed when I returned.
Almost the first impression was that everywhere it is darker with less light on than it had been before the Quake. Besides, 20-30% of the suburban trains have been curtailed in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Many lifts(elevators) and escalators are not working. Those are not because of the damage by the Quake but of administratively planned or voluntary saving of electricity. Many voluntary action is to be seen working toward less energy consumption.
The hardest hit by the Quake and tsunami was the northeastern part of Honshu(Japan's main island) facing the Pacific Ocean. More than 11 thousand people have died and more than 16 thousand are missing. Miyagi Prefecture accounts for the largest of them, followed by Iwate, north of it, and Fukushima, south of it. The origin of the Quake(M9.0) also was located in the sea east of Miyagi. A number of small towns and clusters of houses were wiped out in these three Prefectures, and so were many fishing ports. Altogether 175,000 people are now refugees and are housed in about 2,000 places, mostly schools and other public buildings.
The power cut was due partly to the great damage done to the two Fukushima nuclear plants, but some other non-nuclear power houses in the region were also damaged.
The condition of the first Fukushima nuclear is particularly serious. Or rather it is not yet precisely known what the condition is with each of its six reactors and how seriously each has been damaged. What is known is the existence of highly contaminated water within four of those six buildings, and even outside them, and it must be dealt with as quickly as possible and with utmost care. Experts say that what is essential to avert emergency situation is to tightly wrap up these reactors while cooling them off. This alone would take weeks and months. Then only it would be possible to take on shutting them completely which would be a matter of decades.
One is driven almost to despair, and the workers on the spot are reported to be at their wit's end. But the silver lining here is that the radioactivity in the air and in the water tend to decrease. In Tokyo the tap water has been just proven to be safe even to the zero-year-old babies. I hope it is not for All Fools' Day.
It has been against the law of nature to build a nuclear plant where there is geologically a danger of a quake, but it was done ignoring advice to the contrary, some of which was offered in the Parliament. This is a god-given opportunity changing our entire energy policies, taking much greater care of renewable energies and aiming at making Japan a low-energy economy. At the same time there should be more dissemination of information from the government and the industry. They should stop using 'it is not immediately dangerous' kind of bureaucratic language. Though harassed by the long drawn economic difficulties, and hit by the Quake, tsunami and the nuclear debacle, ours are a creative people and will rise whenever they are shown the honest fact.
The current talk is how we would fill the gap between the supply and demand of electricity in the summer season of July, August and September, when air-conditioning is in great need. The people may endure the hot and humid summer. But how about the industrial foot spread in Eastern Japan, a large part of which is in danger of coming to an enforced standstill if deprived electricity even at intervals.
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