Fukushima Detailed Timeline Available

[Schneibster]

The Nuclear Energy Institute has released a detailed timeline of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. This is important because of the safety implications of the interlocking causes of the problem. There will be both operational and physical changes at nuclear plants around the Pacific Rim and other places where natural disasters can occur, and likely design changes to mitigate or avoid these problems in future plants. This is probably the most important document to emerge from the investigations, and the nuclear industry apparently has finally realized that hiding things when people are as afraid as they are is counterproductive, so it's publicly available.

The executive summary puts the disaster in perspective, by reviewing the total scope of the earthquake and tidal wave, which killed 16,000 people and left an additional 4,000 missing to this day, and comparing the radioactive release with Chernobyl, which released twenty times more radioactive material, and affected a hundred times larger area. It's only two pages and I recommend a read over it at minimum; most people will learn a lot about what happened just from that.

Download the whole thing.