Jun Watanabe
Since I am Japanese I want to let more people know about how exactly Fukushima disaster happened. Let me first talk about Japanese geography. Surprisingly Japan is made of many complex plates underneath. Earthquake happens when those plates rub each other due to volcano activity or break naturally. Do not forget that Earth is also a living organism just like us. There are also similar plates in Italy and in the U.S. When earthquake occur it also causes Tsunami at the same time.
According to nuclear power Company in Japan, they said the power plant did not break due to technological defects. It broke because of earthquake and Tsunami. Do you think this is an acceptable excuse? In my view, I cannot accept it. Japan has always been attacked by earthquake, Tsunami since 4th century which was recorded by written letters. Based on assumption, those natural disasters continuously happened even few thousand years ago. Moreover Japan is the only country where atomic bombs were dropped even twice during Second World War. We have kept promoting that we should not use nuclear energy but the Japanese government did not stop when nuclear power plant was introduced.
According to risk management, at least Japanese citizens are aware that there are many natural disasters happen on century based. Why would we still want to take risk and use this energy? This is because nuclear energy is indeed very efficient way to produce electricity compared to others. For example, thermal power generation creates a lot of CO2 emission which is not responsible for Earth where we live. There are also much alternative energy like wind power and hydroelectric but they all cost so much money compared to nuclear energy. Did you know Japan only generate 6% of energy itself and import the rest from other countries? 90% of energy is produced by fossil fuels and nuclear energy only produces 0.6%. However by 2030, the percentage for nuclear energy will be estimated to nearly 10%. This is because the Japanese government tries to depend less on importing energy.
After Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred, all nuclear power plants were stopped until 2015. Although around 60% of Japanese citizens were against their decision, the government decided to start using them once again. The worst thing about this incident is that the government did not know what to do in order to save victims. In other words, they should have at least prepared well for precautionary principle. Once the government has complete precautionary principle, it might be possible to use more nuclear energy. However this will not be an easy task to do. Because it is impossible to know when exactly natural disaster would happen.