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Understatement of the Week: Glenn McCullough

By ANTHONY HALL, United Press International
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The UPI Understatement of the Week for March 13, 2011, could be considered a debatable statement.

Not shirking from the potential for controversy here, understatements frequently follow magnanimous events and the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that hit the northeastern coast of Japan Friday unequivocally qualifies. The death toll could reach 20,000 or more from the quake that shattered lives, property, businesses and potentially the economy of Japan. The struggle to lower the national debt was suddenly sidelined with rebuilding, emergency and healthcare costs expected to reach tens of billions of dollars. A proud country Japan, in a lethal earth-shattering moment, was left instantly poorer on human and economic fronts.

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There have been only five or six earthquakes in history of equivalent or greater strength of Friday's tremor of origin, six if you count the 1833 quake in Sumatra, Indonesia, where the force of the seismic activity is, of course, an estimate.

On the other hand, there have been many with far greater death tolls -- 15 of them listed on Wikipedia with up to 100,000 dead. The deadliest on record, 1556 in China, with an estimated death toll of 830,000 on a tremor estimated at 8 on the Richter scale.

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But modern Japan faces a complication few nations have had to confront: The possibility one of its nuclear power plants may be damaged enough to cause a nuclear meltdown.

At the Tokyo Electric Power Co., nuclear generator located in the Fukushima prefecture, authorities evacuated thousands of people in a 2-mile radius as a precaution after reports of an explosion at the plant.

Both nuclear power and earthquakes are common in Japan, and reactors built with this in mind are designed to shut down in the event of a seismic disturbance. However, in this case, the backup generators meant to pump water through the plant failed after the earthquake struck.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported the plant was running on battery power and that backup generators were not working in one of six reactors at the plant. In addition, the Post said, "elevated radiation levels" had been recorded in the control room of one of other reactor units.

The plant was built 40 years ago or 26 years after nuclear bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing at least 100,000 people and 70,000 people, respectively, both estimates officially ambiguous and considered extremely conservative, given the Japanese banned note taking after the bombings.

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The Understatement of the Week: Glenn McCullough, former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who has been monitoring the situation in Japan.

"This is the most challenging seismic event on record, so it is a severe test. Clearly the Japanese government is taking this very seriously," he said.

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