Radioactive material spread over an area that includes some of Japan's most valuable farmland. Officials say eighty-one thousand hectares of farmland are too heavily irradiated to let farmers plant rice. Vegetable, fruit and dairy farms also are affected.
Japan's government has been seeking advice from foreign scientists about how to reduce the radiation levels. Some of the scientists are from the former Soviet Union, site of the nineteen ninety-six Chernobyl nuclear accident.
No one has died from radiation as a result of the accident in Japan. Some scientists and government officials say radiation levels even close to the disabled power plant are safe. But since the disaster, officials have faced growing distrust among the Japanese public.
Japan also finds itself facing huge costs for cleaning up after the nuclear disaster and for paying damages to victims. Before the accident, nuclear power produced thirty percent of Japan's energy needs. Now some people think the accident will be the end of the nuclear power industry in the world's third largest economy.
Thorne Lay is a seismologist with the University of California, Santa Cruz. He says engineers had underestimated the chances that a great wave could drown the emergency power systems at the Japanese plant.
THORNE LAY: "Those are mostly design weaknesses that a good engineering think-through might say, let's put the backup power at very high elevations so that it could not possibly get drowned out."
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25