To shed light on how leadership shaped the outcome, we’ve reconstructed that story here-from several firsthand interviews detailed reports by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the utility that owns both plants the Nuclear Energy Institute and a number of public sources. Less well known is the crisis at Fukushima Daini, a sister plant about 10 kilometers to the south, which also suffered severe damage but escaped Daiichi’s fate. Since the tsunami, Daiichi has been consumed by the challenge of containing and reducing the radioactive water and debris left behind. Without electricity to run the plant’s cooling systems, managers and workers couldn’t avert catastrophe: People around the world watched grainy footage of the explosions, gray plumes of smoke and steam blotting the skyline. When we hear the words “Fukushima disaster,” most of us think of Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power plant wracked by three core meltdowns and three reactor building explosions following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Daini survived the crisis without an explosion or a meltdown. With each new problem they encountered, it recalibrated, iteratively creating continuity and restoring order. Until the last reactor went into cold shutdown, Masuda’s team took nothing for granted. Luck played a part, but so did smart leadership and sensemaking.
In a volatile environment, Masuda and Daini’s hundreds of employees responded to each unexpected event in turn. To prevent the disaster experienced up north, the site superintendent, Naohiro Masuda, and his team had to connect them to the plant’s surviving power sources. The world is familiar with Daiichi’s fate less well known is the crisis at its sister plant, Daini, about 10 kilometers to the south.Īs a result of nature’s onslaught, three of Daini’s four reactors lacked sufficient power to achieve cooldown. In March 2011 Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was devastated by three reactor explosions and three core meltdowns in the days following a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami that produced waves as high as 17 meters.