A British economist in Singapore says the succession of crises in Japan will have a global ripple effect like no event since 9/11.
An American nuclear scientist places the crisis somewhere beyond Three Mile Island but well below Chernobyl. Asked for a worst-case scenario, he declines to answer. A newscaster, meanwhile, announces that the primary containment structure in the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been damaged.
The European Union’s energy chief, Guenther Oettinger, says the situation is out of control. “We are somewhere between a disaster and a major disaster,” he tells the European Parliament. He adds: “There is talk of an apocalypse, and I think the word is particularly well chosen.”
A Tokyo oil executive talks of how life has changed since the earthquake and tsunami, how the news has cast a pall over all of Japan, how while the riot of lights in Tokyo have gone dim, the image he can’t get out of his head is of a little sushi dive he once visited on a business trip in the north, the surprise of the place and the near certainty now that it is forever lost to the ferocity of the tsunami wave.
Amid the stories of loss, there is the story of the 50 workers — 50 heroes — left at the nuclear plant to battle the crisis, spraying water on the heated rods, and risking their health, and maybe their lives, in the process.
The emperor, for the first time, goes on TV to tell the people he is “very worried” about the dangers posed by the nuclear plant.
In America, we can’t stay away from the TV. We watch and we send our checks to the Red Cross and we delight in the story of an elderly man who was rescued and we talk of meltdowns without knowing what a meltdown actually means or what, for that matter, a meltdown could mean.
TVs are tuned everywhere to CNN, to the latest video of the giant wave sweeping cars away, tossing boats aside, claiming land and lives with a force that doesn’t seem real, as people desperately sought high ground in a part of Japan where there isn’t any high ground.
We watch a man tell the story of how he jumped into his car and literally outraced the wave. He said it was something out of a movie, but what movie would dare give us an earthquake and a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown?
Residents within 12 miles of the Fukushima plant are told to evacuate. The news from the government seems to change, though, with the hour. And Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tells Congress that the Japanese have understated the danger and tells Americans there should be a 50-mile perimeter.
On NPR, two environmentalists argue the future of nuclear power in the United States. One says that coal causes many more deaths and that nuclear power is the best possible bridge to renewable energy use. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution causes 2 million premature deaths a year. But the Japanese crisis brings us back to the question: How bad is the worst-case scenario?
House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee, meanwhile, voted down an amendment to a bill limiting the reach of the EPA on greenhouse gas emissions — an amendment saying that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal . . . .”
As we watch Japan, we debate in America what levels of risk we can tolerate. We see Japan, as prepared as any country, in crisis. But do you make policy based on a 100-year storm, on a 100-year cataclysm? Have we seen the worst-case scenario?
I was in San Francisco for the 1989 World Series earthquake. It was a big one — registering 6.9 — but not the big one, not nearly as big as the earthquake in Japan — the fourth-largest in a century. It’s not the shaking that I remember. It’s the trip back to the hotel, to a darkened city, cops on the streets with flashlights, fires burning in the distance. They housed us in the ballroom downstairs — the rooms were full of glass — and the backup generator gave us TV and CNN showing, over and over, a car falling through a collapsed section of the Bay Bridge. I had crossed that bridge that morning.
Simon Winchester — who wrote a fascinating book about Krakatoa, the 19th century volcano near Java that caused a catastrophic tsunami — has a piece in Newsweek about earthquakes in the Pacific. He writes of how the so-called Pacific ring of fire has seen recent massive earthquakes in three corners — Chile, New Zealand and Japan — and that California could be next.
It’s not a prediction. It’s less a warning than it is a reminder of the lesson that we learn and relearn and learn again — “that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent — which can be withdrawn at any time.”
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@ .
