Walls built by memories of the earthquake: The day Kashiwazaki Kariwa shook and the shadow passed on to Fukushima (2007)

Walls built by memories of the earthquake: The day Kashiwazaki Kariwa shook and the shadow passed on to Fukushima (2007)

The 2007 Niigata Chuetsu-oki Earthquake hit the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant with a violent tremor that caused many problems, including building damage, fires, equipment ruptures, and toppled radioactive waste drums. Most serious, however, was the malfunctioning of the Emergency Response Office, the nerve center of the disaster response. The nucleus of command was lost when walls collapsed and communications were cut off, exposing the enormous system of the nuclear power plant as too vulnerable to earthquakes. This painful lesson was deeply engraved within TEPCO and was the direct impetus for the installation of a seismically isolated critical building at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. With its seismic isolation, independent power supply, multiple communications, and space for worker evacuation, the building was sometimes seen as an excessive safety feature when it was completed in 2009, but during the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear accident, it serve
d as the sole base of operations for hundreds of workers and command staff. It played a vital role as the nerve center of the accident response, maintaining communications and decision-making in the face of explosions and loss of power. From the Chuetsu-oki earthquake to the Fukushima accident, Japan's nuclear administration remained bound by the safety myth that a major accident could not occur, but the seismic isolation building, born of the failure at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, was the last barrier that could withstand a real crisis beyond that myth. The memory of the destruction wrought by nature has at the same time created a structure to protect the future, and continues to sound a silent alarm about the state of nuclear power even today.