Mark Willacy

Mark Willacy is an Australian reporter who happened to be stationed in Japan at the time of the tsunami. He has written an informative and compelling book about the tsunami and nuclear meltdown that is still on-going at the power plants. Regarding the meltdown, he gives us just enough technical information for a basic understanding of how a nuclear power plant works, and what can go wrong, but not so much technical information that the reader's eyes glaze over.

The book narrates an hour by hour account of the events occurring inside the plant. It also tells the stories of a cross-section of the people living and working in and around the power plant, including a nuclear engineer (who spent days inside the plant after the tsunami), a pig farmer, a teacher, a fisherman, and so on. We learn of their lives before the event and how they cope after the event, each suffering different degrees of loss.

Willacy also was able to interview the Japanese prime minister while the events were on-going, and these interviews provide a chilling glimpse of just how unprepared the Japanese government and the power company were to deal with the situation. Indeed, their primary concern at first was to cover up just how serious the event was. This resulted in many people being exposed to much more radiation than they could have been, due to the failure to order evacuation in a timely manner, and also ordering evacuation in the wrong direction, i.e. to where the fallout was the most dense.

This book was published fairly soon after the tsunami. We know that the full extent of the damage is still unknown and ongoing. I'm going to try to find something more up-to-date, although that is not a criticism of this book, and I still recommend it.… (altro)