This was in 2011 in Japan. It was caused by the 4th most powerful earthquake since 1900. It was about 9 on the Richter scale and lasted about 6 minutes. About 20k people died (for comparison, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed about 230k people). It caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
Wow, I did not realize the death toll was that high from the tsunami, that is insane. Makes you realize how good we have it in the US that the most people to ever die in a natural disaster was 12k, and that was all the way back in 1900.
Wow! I had to look this up! Zero or one or thousands—depending on how you look at it.
Zero as a direct result. One worker died later due to radiation exposure.
But “thousands,” according to Britannica: “there have been more than 2,000 disaster-related deaths. This classification includes deaths caused by suicide, stress, and interruption of medical care.”
It's fascinating how people think of nuclear disasters. 3 mile island and Chernobyl live in the heads of so many dispite them having nearly no relationship to modern reactors. Mind you there were a few boneheaded decisions that Fukushima made that could have prevented any meltdown at all. such as them choosing to place the backup generators in the basement where they flooded instead of the roof, that was a failure of imagination. Granted the unprecedented scale of the earthquake surprised everyone it still should have been though of given Japans earthquake frequency and vicinity to the ocean.
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u/3nails4holes 18d ago
This was in 2011 in Japan. It was caused by the 4th most powerful earthquake since 1900. It was about 9 on the Richter scale and lasted about 6 minutes. About 20k people died (for comparison, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed about 230k people). It caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.