Japan can’t seem to catch a break.
The United States bombed the hell out of their county during World War Two, killing thousands upon thousands of people, and still mother earth felt the need to hit them once again on March 11, 2011 with a powerful earthquake and tsunami that left 27,000 people dead and 240,000 people homeless. The most devastating part of the natural disaster was the destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, sending off huge amounts of radiation into the country. The worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, the disaster killed three people and endangered thousands. According to TIME magazine, “…a spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the utility that runs Fukushima Daiichi…said water from the No. 2 reactor turbine building had levels of radiation 10 million times higher than normal. Tests on the surface of a pool of water showed more than 1,000 millisieverts (mSv) per hour, four times the safety level”. Days after the damage to the core reactors, officials stated that they found unsafe levels of radiation in water supplies as far as Tokyo, 220km north. The Japanese economy is hurting from the disaster as well with countries like the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia banning the import of milk and some vegetables from the contaminated areas. Because of the contamination on farms in the area, chicken feed was deemed useless and resulted in an egg shortage throughout the country, driving up prices 40% in Tokyo. Contamination was found in a wide range of food products, including beef, tea leaves, mushrooms, baby formula and rice, the nation’s staple. Many people around the country are concerned that they will be faced with a food shortage. Maybe it is time for the United States to invest heavily in food export…
On December 16, 2011, technicians finally declared that they had regained control of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. While this may seem like the end to the disaster, radiation is still present and creates for an unsafe living environment. The NY Times reported, “More than 90,000 people remain displaced from the evacuation zone around the plant, and as the government begins lifting evacuation orders for some communities, many are refusing to return home”. Do you blame them? If my home was in the middle of a radioactive zone, you couldn’t pay me to move back.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/japan/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2061803,00.html
Though it appears that there is virtually no originality in this writing, you have done a decent job in culling the information from (ostensibly) several sources into a compactly informative piece. For example, the Time magazine article you referenced make up the bulk of the information contained in your blog.
However, you left out what in my humble opinion are a few crucial pieces of information from that article. Namely: “(A single dose of 1,000 mSv causes radiation-sickness symptoms such as nausea and vomiting; a single dose of 5,000 mSv would kill about half of those receiving it within a month.)…Later in the day, TEPCO officials admitted that the number was a miscalculation and that the radiation level was actually 100,000 times above normal — still high, but better than previous results.” It would have added more perspective to your work.