Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
March 10, 2014 David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Q. Stranahan, and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) have published a book in time for the third anniversary of the beginning of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. The book details the blow by blow unfolding of the disaster at Japan, and serves as a searing indictment of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's dereliction of its safety duty domestically, risking an American Fukushima.
See UCS's web post about the book's publication here. See UCS's press release here. See UCS's blog post here.
UCS's Director of News & Commentary, Elliott Negin posted a blog at HuffPost's Green site. LA Times Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Michael Hiltzik has pointed to Fukushima's lessons learned (his column includes a link to his earlier review of the book).
Lochbaum is the head of the UCS's Nuclear Safety Project, and also author of Nuclear Waste Disposal Crisis. Lyman is a senior scientist in the Global Security Program of UCS. Stranahan was the lead reporter of the Philadelphia Inquirer's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Three Mile Island accident and the author of Susquehanna: River of Dreams.
Given the presence of 23 operating GE BWR Mark Is in the U.S., and 8 operating Mark IIs, this book has important Fukushima "lessons learned" to be applied here. This is especially true, given the conclusion of the Japanese Diet (Parliament), that the root cause of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe was not the earthquake and tsunami, but rather the industry-regulatory agency-elected official collusion, which left the nuclear power plant so vulnerable to the natural disasters. Of course, as this book makes clear, we have such collusion in spades here in the U.S.