Japan's Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster Syndrome: An Unprecedented Form of Catastrophe

Extract

The seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko (presently Emeritus Professor at Kobe University) predicted that a nuclear power plant accident like the present one was possible, and issued warnings from the late ‘90s. People had been warning of the danger of earthquake-caused nuclear accidents since the 1970s, but Ishibashi, from the specialized standpoint of seismology, proposed a new concept, which he called genpatsu shinsai [Translator's note: this expression literally means Nuclear-Power-Plant-Earthquake Disaster. As there is no English expression for this (the phenomenon itself is new) in this work we will render it as genpatsu shinsai syndrome.]. By this he meant a situation in which, as the damage from the earthquake widens, the situation is made doubly worse by nuclear radiation damage. It was in the hope of preventing this that he was issuing warnings. Ishibashi wrote many books on this, including Daichidouran no Jidai (The Age of Shifting Earth) (Iwanami Shinsho) and he is a very well-known scholar, so it is impossible that his warnings were unknown to the officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).