“To help mitigate future seismic disasters, Japan has built a sprawling undersea earthquake-detection system capable of providing up to 20 additional minutes of warning time before tsunamis hit coastal areas. During Fukushima, residents had just 10 minutes of warning,” reports The Doomslayer.
If the ocean floor had a nervous system, it might look something like this: thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables connected to sensors set atop the fault lines where Japan’s earthquakes begin. Completed in June, this system aims to stave off devastation like that of 2011—when a relentless six-minute-long temblor was followed by a 130-foot tsunami that reached speeds of 435 miles per hour and pounded cities into rubble. Delayed alerts gave some communities less than 10 minutes to evacuate and only warned of much smaller waves, based on inaccurate earthquake readings. Nearly 20,000 people died, with thousands more injured or missing…
With the final N-net link set up this June, the complete system increases warning times by 20 seconds for earthquakes and a full 20 minutes for tsunamis—enough time to divert incoming flights and close sea gates in busy ports.
Last year, dozens died after massive earthquakes rocked Japan. Last year, here was a “big symbolic move by Japan to embrace nuclear power today,” notes a Bloomberg News reporter. “Its new draft energy policy removed Fukushima-era language about reducing reliance on nuclear power over the long term.” The “plan now calls for nuclear & renewables to be utilized ‘to the fullest extent.’”
Before a major earthquake caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011, Japan generated up to 30% of its electrical power from nuclear reactors. But after the accident, Japan temporarily shut down all its nuclear energy plants, even though “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident,” according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
In 2023, nuclear power generated only 5.55% of Japan’s electricity.
