This morning I was reading my internet friend Coco's blog, and someone had left this video as a response. Not really sure I would have put it next to a page dedicated to girl's day, but it is very good. This is an hour long documentary about the Tsunami and Fukushima Dai-ichi plant as told by elementary school students on the east coast. Many of these children watched their friends be washed away by the tsunami, or were evacuated from the area near the plant. Warning; definitely cry worthy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_AxnoNrr_8
Since my mother works in a power plant almost just like Dai-ichi she was very interested in what was going on. Brownsferry is a bit different, but all modern plants are built roughly the same way; they have very strict rules on how they are built after Chernobyl. Nuclear power is very clean and safe if the rules are followed, but no one was planning for such a huge tsunami to hit a power plant. How can you plan for something that has never happened before? After the Tsunami even more rules and procedures were written, some of them by my mother!
She had never really been interested in Japanese culture before the Tsunami, but afterwards she calls the men who stayed to shut down the plant 'my nuclear brothers.' After all, she went through a taste of how scary it must have been for them. A large group of tornadoes ripped through the area about this time last year, and she was stuck in the plant. She had to shut the reactor unit she was watching down, and she couldn't get a hold of any of us siblings. She didn't know we were safe in the basement; she thought I was at college, and that my younger siblings had been sent home with no one there to help them. She had thought we could have been dead, and that our home could've been destroyed. Luckily the tornado missed our house, and I got home safely before the tornadoes came. There were trees down, the power went out, and several houses up the road were damaged, but everyone near us was ok.
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