Despite the thoroughly creepy pictures begging me to donate money on the banner, I found the Fukushima disaster on Wikipedia.
Please stop, Jimmy Wales. I never plagiarized from you, so I owe you nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
According to this website, in March this year, there were a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.
2 of the reactors had been shut down for planned maintenance. Then, the plant experienced equipment problems following the earthquake. Then, they were flooded by a tsunami. These poor people really couldn’t catch a break. The natural disasters electrical failures and therefore the generators heated up. The tsunami ruined things with the coolers so that everything overheated.
The first 3 reactors experienced a total meltdown. It was even estimated that “75% of the core of one unit melted and slumped into the lower quarter of the unit.” I can’t really even tell what that means, but it sounds absolutely awful. Reactors 1 and 3 had explosions, and reactor 4 had fires.
This is a giant hole in reactor 4. It’s not supposed to be there.
The number of this meltdown on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) started out at 4 and was ultimately raised to a 7, the highest number on the scale.
Two of the workers at the plant died from what is thought to be blood loss, and 45 were reported dead after a nearby hospital was evacuated. However, that’s not the most dangerous part. It was estimated by a U.S. scientist that 1,000 people will die of cancer from radiation exposure as a result of the meltdown. The disaster brought the rate of cancer up by 0.1 percent.