Disaster in Japan: what the deadly earthquake and tsunami mean for Japan, the global economy, and the future of nuclear power in the United States.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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The massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan last month left that nation--and the world--with a host of troubling questions.

How is Japan, a global economic power whose economy was already struggling, going to recover from a disaster of this magnitude?

What's going to happen to Japan's critically damaged nuclear power plants--and to the nuclear power industry in general, especially in the United States, where nuclear power seemed to be on the verge of a comeback?

And is the rest of the world, including the U.S., prepared for this kind of disaster?

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11 struck off the coast of northeastern Japan. It caused a massive tsunami that slammed into the Japanese coast, killing thousands and obliterating entire villages. The quake was about 1,000 times stronger than the one that devastated Haiti last year and about 32 times stronger than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The combination of earthquake and tsunami crippled a string of nuclear power plants, damaging their cooling systems and threatening catastrophic meltdowns and the release of deadly amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan described the triple whammy--the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear calamity--as Japan's "worst crisis since World War II."

Economic Damage

The disaster further imperiled Japan's $5 trillion economy, which had been struggling to climb out of a two-decade-long slump. In the last year, Japan was overtaken by China as the world's second-largest economy, after the United States.

Although Japan's industrial centers in the south and west seem to have been spared the worst, the crisis at the damaged nuclear plants north of Tokyo threatened to significantly reduce the amount of electricity available, forcing automakers like Toyota and Honda, as well as electronics giants like Sony, to halt production. That could further slow down the Japanese economy.

The damage to the nuclear power plants will likely have long-term effects on the country's ability to generate enough electricity to power its high-tech economy. Japan is one of the world's top consumers of nuclear energy. The country's 17 nuclear plants--with 55 reactors--provided about 30 percent of the country's electricity needs.

The Japanese are particularly sensitive about nuclear issues, having suffered the only nuclear attacks in history when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and...