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255 13 An Envirotechnical Disaster Negotiating Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima sara B. PrITchard The Tōhoku earthquake, now called the “Great east Japan earthquake,” began rattling the island nation at 2:46 in the afternoon (JST) on that fateful spring day. The enormous magnitude 9.0 earthquake—the largest ever known to have hit Japan and also one of the five most powerful earthquakes in the entire world since modern record keeping began in the early twentieth century—shook buildings, buckled streets, and terrified the country’s citizens for an astounding six minutes. A major tsunami, eventually rising to the height of a four-story building, soon began rushing headlong toward northeastern Japan, barreling down on the country ’s coastline at the speed of an airborne jumbo jet. Japan’s many inlets and bays became particularly vulnerable as the tsunami, approaching the shore, became concentrated in the ever-narrowing landscape, pushing the foreboding wall of water even higher into contracting valleys. In one bay, the tsunami is believed to have reached 38.9 meters (127 feet). Once the tsunami made landfall, it slammed large ships into bridges and tossed cars as if they were children’s toys, washing away coastal villages and highways in mere seconds. There were at least twenty thousand casualties that afternoon. But the calamity was not yet over. The tsunami easily breached the thirteen-foot cliff on which the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station owned by Tokyo electric Power Company (TePCO) is located, flooding the basements of buildings where most of the plant’s backup generators had been placed. Although the havoc-wreaking tsunami has garnered much attention, some critics have wondered if the earthquake itself caused severe damage to the facility, possibly breaking recirculation and cooling pipes and causing cracks in the reactor walls even before the wall of water hit shore. Then, a few days after the destructive earthquake and enormous tsunami, three of the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi experienced full meltdowns—possibly even melt-throughs.1 Sara B. Pritchard 256 Such was the triple disaster Japan suffered on that early spring day. A single word—“Fukushima”—now stands for the multifaceted complexity of the events that took place on March 11, 2011, and all that has transpired in the months ever since.2 even before Fukushima, the early twenty-first century had already offered environmental historians several significant teaching moments—for better and for worse.3 Now Japan’s triple disaster provides yet another occasion for environmental historians to engage with pressing questions—questions about the construction and maintenance of energy regimes, both politically and technologically, in the modern world; the development, expansion, and implications of the atomic age for both humans and nonhumans; and the relationship between nature (including human bodies) and technological systems.4 Several leading scholars, including sociologist Charles Perrow and historian Thomas Parke Hughes, have studied the design and operation of large-scale, modern technological systems like those at Fukushima Daiichi.5 Building on their insights, in this chapter I examine Fukushima as an envirotechnical disaster, a result of the convergence of natural and sociotechnical processes.6 I argue that the concept of envirotechnical systems is a useful way to explain what happened at Fukushima that also goes beyond what Perrow and Hughes offer through their concepts of “normal accidents” and technological systems, respectively. In the final section, I employ the notion of envirotechnical regimes to particularly stress the strategic configuration of Fukushima Daiichi’s envirotechnical system, highlighting the ways in which political and economic power shaped the making of the facility, both during normal operations and throughout the events that began to unfold on March 11, 2011. Normal Accidents, Technological Systems, and Envirotechnical Analysis In 1984, Charles Perrow published Normal Accidents, his now-classic study of the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island five years earlier, arguing that complex, tightly coupled systems like the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island (and, as it turns out, the ones at Fukushima Daiichi) invariably lead to accidents.7 In his analysis, Perrow highlighted the unpredictable dynamics of these sociotechnical systems given their size, complexity, and inextricability.8 Journalists from the New York Times expressed a version of Perrow’s idea two days into the Fukushima crisis when they described “a cascade of accumulating problems.”9 Perrowasserted,however,thatitismisleading,ifnothazardous,tousethecommon term “accidents” to describe situations like that of Fukushima Daiichi because it minimizes the inherent risks of modern technological systems.10 Such language [13.58.150.59...

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