Strong in the rain

This is the book I have just finished, "Strong in the rain" by Lucy Birmingham and David McNeil about the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that occurred in Japan in March 2011.
   I hadn't read or seen much about this, deliberately avoiding the subject as it occurred soon after our own disaster here in February 2011. 
   Compared to the Japanese experience, our earthquake was really minor. We did not have a tsunami nor do we have nuclear power stations. We do not have millions of people packed together in tall buildings. The nuclear power angle to the Japanese tragedy was for me the scariest part of this book. The Fukushima-Daiichi plant is still not de-activated; it is only kept stable by pumping thousands of gallons of seawater daily into the outer casings of the reactor chambers. It prompted a bit of research on my part as I realised that I really don't know how reactors work. I didn't know, for example, that the spent fuel rods have to be kept cool for about 2 years in pools, until they can be safely shipped to reprocessing plants. Of course, they are still radioactive as well as very, very hot. A reactor in crisis cannot just be shut off either; there is no off switch, it continues to react until all the fuel is burnt away, but of course, everything around it continues to be radioactive for many thousands of years.
   And one has to question the wisdom of placing nuclear reactors not just on a fault line, but on one of the most active faultlines on earth, on a faultline that generates 20% of the world's magnitude 8 and above earthquakes. Not only that, but to locate the reactors right on a seacoast notorious for its devastating tsunami. It is still unknown where the melted fuel actually is inside the reactors that malfunctioned; has it burned through the containment vessels or is it still in the reactor chamber? The reactors at Fukushima are still live and could still go critical if there is another event, which seems quite likely. I wish humankind had never discovered how to split atoms; it seems a foolish thing to want to do in hindsight. (And it was a New Zealander who did it first, much to our misplaced pride)
   There are two excellent documentaries on youTube. The first,
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPHl3P-FedM Japan's tsunami: how it happened explains the technical side of the quake, the tsunami and the reactor problems. The second,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oArd_9uZOnE Japan's tsunami caught on camera is a very powerful documentary of individual experiences of the quake and the tsunami that followed.