Ben D. Kritz
In March 2011, Japan suffered a catastrophe of such a scale that had it been the plot of a movie, it would have been scoffed at for being unrealistic. Part of that disaster, of course, was the complete breakdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was swamped by the tsunami created by the 9.0-magnitude Tohoku Earthquake. The ensuing nuclear emergency was given a rating of 7 on the International Nuclear Emergency Scale—only the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine in 1985 was rated that high before Fukushima—and caused large-scale evacuations of the area around the plant.