Ten years ago this week, the world watched in horror as a nuclear plant with multiple reactors in Fukushima, Japan, melted down on live TV day after day after day - the aftermath of a natural disaster in the form of a March 11, 2011, earthquake and its ensuing tsunami.
Here in the Tennessee Valley, we were especially attentive: The Japanese nuclear plant was a near-twin of the Tennessee Valley Authority's oldest and largest nuclear plant - the Browns Ferry plant in Athens, Alabama, which has three spent fuel pools elevated several stories high and housed in the same secondary containment areas as the plant's three reactors.
We needed to be attentive. A month and a half after the Fukushima disaster, an April 2011 tornado outbreak - 492 tornadoes in the Southeast in the space of about three days - left nearly 360 people dead, twisted miles of electrical grid in Northeast Alabama and Mississippi into enormous steel pretzels and sent all three of Browns Ferry's reactors into "automatic" shutdown.
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