A Year Later: U.S. Nuclear Plants and their Business Partners Prepare for Post-Fukushima Changes

Blog Post: A Year Later: U.S. Nuclear Plants and their Business Partners Prepare for Post-Fukushima Changes

from Nuclear Power Industry News by Nuclear Street News Team

This Sunday marks a year since the Fukushima Daiichi crisis began in Japan. A tsunami the height of a three-story building inundated Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s coastal plants and made real a scenario that even the most creative emergency manager would find hard to believe – a beyond-design-basis event resulting in a total station blackout that lasted for days. Three reactors succumbed to severe core damage. Hydrogen explosions and fire ripped the roofs from four units. Spent fuel pools overheated. Radiation forced 200,000 people to evacuate.

The reaction of America’s nuclear power plant operators and their regulators was immediate. Now both have begun to implement lessons learned from the crisis, and a clearer picture is beginning to emerge for plant owners and the businesses that serve them of the equipment and work that lie ahead.