Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station near Okuma sustained an unknown amount of damage in the March 11 earthquake off Japan's east coast. All six of the plant's reactors are now shut down, taking 4.5 gigawatts electric (GWe) offline. (Two other stations, Fukushima Daini and Tokai-2, were also shut down as a precaution, taking another 4.3 GWe and 1.06 GWe offline, respectively.) Okuma is about 300 kilometers (180 miles) north of the Japanese capital of Tokyo and 100 kilometers south of Sendai, the major city closest to the epicenter of the earthquake. While details are sketchy — even the location of the plant is somewhat disputed — authorities have released that radiation levels are 1,000 times above normal in the facility's control room, but they said circumstances have not degraded to the point that workers have needed to evacuate. News releases indicate there is a problem with the coolant system in two of Fukushima Daiichi's six reactors. This suggests a problem with the facility's automatic shutdown systems; normally, control rods would simply slam into place and make the reactor inert. Emergency batteries and coolant are being continuously flown into the plant to prevent any degradation of the situation. The chances of this developing into a meltdown or other major core breach are slim — but they still exist. The fact that automatic safeguards appear to have failed is reason enough to pay attention to what could be the first significant nuclear disaster in the world since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. Should a disaster develop, the concern is not so much for the local area. The immediate area is not a critical geography for Japan. Okuma has a population of only 10,000, and it is a coastal town hard up against steeply rising mountains. There are no major population centers within several dozen kilometers, winds blow east out to sea and the plant's location is directly on the coast. At this time, there are no reports of an external radiation leak, although authorities have evacuated a 10-kilometer radius around the plant as a precaution. (The closest major city is the regional capital of Fukushima, 60 kilometers to the northwest, with a population of 290,000.) But that hardly means there would not be a massive impact. With 53 reactors, Japan is the most nuclearized country in the world, getting more than one-third of its power from such technologies. Assuming that a meltdown could be easily contained, and even assuming that the damage from the earthquake could be quickly repaired, the fact remains that when earthquakes happen, nuclear facilities must be checked — and doing this requires shutting some of them down. Japan has no national natural gas grid, so the only option to keep the lights on is to burn fuel oil and similar petroleum-based products in thermal power plants. On several occasions during the past decade, many of Japan's reactors have been offline simultaneously for safety checks and system redesigns. Never have more than one-quarter of Japan's reactors been offline simultaneously, but the shift in energy inputs increased the country's oil intake by as much as 500,000 barrels per day. That is something that could stress global oil supplies to the limit because of Middle East unrest. There also is the possibility that other countries become disenchanted with nuclear power. The American nuclear accident at Three Mile Island and the Soviet disaster at Chernobyl chilled enthusiasm for nuclear power for decades. Having a new disaster — in the world's most pro-nuclear-power nation, no less — would only set the industry back further.