There isn't anything in it I didn't know, since the Japanese press hasn't exactly ignored that entire event...
Being 90 miles from the plant make me an above-average interested observer.
Only a few comments:
I think most people would say that Ex-PM Kan was forced to resign because the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) twisted as much as possible to try to regain power, since Kan broke their 60 year stranglehold on the government prior to the quake. Politicians will lie, steal, scheme and stoop lower that normal humans to maintain or gain power.
When people criticize him, saying he downplayed the danger, I wonder what I (or you) would do if we were in the job? It's a tough call. Evacuating the entire Kanto Plain would be like trying to evacuate the entire population of California, Oregon and Washington state. That's a lot of people. Would you want to incite panic? Would you make that call?
This is ongoing. It is not something that's over just because it isn't on the news anymore. Workers still have to be rotated through the plant for the cleanup and it will continue for decades. That is some extraordinary conviction and perseverance. Disposal and/or decontamination of continuously leaking, radioactive cooling water is a continuing problem. Storage of the massive amounts of water being used is a significant logistics problem. Almost no one realizes how big the scale is of the continuing operation there. There are new challenges and problems that have to be solved every day.
The continuing economic nightmare from the tsunami is another topic.
A big lesson that should have been learned from this, in my opinion, is this:
Non engineers should not be leaders of utilities (like TEPCO), or businesses that are based on technology. The TEPCO president at the time came to power as a pedantic cost-cutter with no technical background to appreciate the true risks of his actions. Ironically, he had been the leader of the risk management committee. Maybe it's more like a dark comedy...
I edited this to add one more comment: I'm really tired of it all. I can't imagine how hard it must be on the people working at the plant every day.
