What’s going on at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi?

AP Photo/GeoEye

As conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continue to evolve, and with plant officials working around the clock to cool the nuclear fuel rods that have been overheating since the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last Friday caused both the reactor’s cooling system and back-up cooling system to fail, many continue to worry about the possibility of a nuclear meltdown, an overheating of the nuclear reactor’s core.

See what happens during a nuclear meltdown.

This possibility continues to worry Americans as we continue to politically debate the feasibility of rebuilding our own nuclear power program in an effort to stay global warming. And it seems that whenever such a possibility of meltdown arises, Americans turn to history to tell us what to expect, namely Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.


The media seems to be captivated by the potential for a nuclear crisis, and it’s hard to tell whether our fear of nuclear power is what feeds that coverage or if it’s the other way around. Regardless, we are lacking in knowledge about nuclear technology, and in order to understand the risks, we need to understand the technology.

BoingBoing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker has written a good primer called Nuclear energy 101. It’s essentially a quick beginners guide to what happens inside of a nuclear reactor.

At a basic level, nuclear energy isn’t all that different from fossil fuel energy. The process of generating electricity at a nuclear power plant is really all about making heat, just as it is at a coal-fired plant. Heat turns water to steam, steam moves turbines in the electric generator. The only difference is where the heat comes from–to get it, you can light coal on fire, or you can create a controlled nuclear fission reaction.

A fission reaction is a lot like a table filled with Jenga games, each stack of blocks standing close to another stack. Pull out the right block, and one Jenga stack will fall. As it does, it collapses into the surrounding stacks. As those stacks tumble, they crash into others. Nuclear fission works the same way–one unstable atom breaks apart, throwing off pieces of itself, which crash into nearby atoms and cause those to break apart, too.

Every time one of those atoms breaks apart, it releases a little heat. Multiply by millions of atoms, and you have enough heat to turn water into steam.

Gaining knowledge about nuclear technology is the key to moving forward, to understanding the risks involved in a particular situation and weighing the potential outcomes. And in an editorial on Monday, the Wall Street Journal cautions against using the crisis in Japan as an excuse to no longer pursue nuclear technology in the U.S.:


Japan, in fact, has 55 operating nuclear power plants, and this is the first accident of this magnitude they’ve encountered. Not surprising when you take into account that it occurred alongside the 4th largest recorded earthquake in history and a powerful tsunami.

But here’s something else that may surprise you: the U.S. Navy is nuclear powered, including all of its aircraft carriers and submarines. In a statement to the House Subcommittee on Science in 2003, Adm. Skip Bowman, Ret., who was then Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, testified that the Navy’s nuclear-powered ships have “safely steam[ed] more than 128 million miles, equivalent to over 5,000 trips around the Earth… without a reactor accident… indeed, with no measurable negative impact on the environment or human health.

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John Fay

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