This Sunday is the first anniversaryof the major earthquake and tsunami in Japan.It led to one of the worst nuclear accidents ever.The quake struck near the east coast of Honshu,Japan's main island.It was one of the most powerful ever recorded-- a magnitude nine. A wall of water struck the land.Twenty thousand people died, mostly from the tsunami.More than two hundred fifty thousand buildings were destroyed.Nearly four hundred thousand people were left homeless.Some rebuilding has begun.But many people are still in temporary housing.Three reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichinuclear power station suffered meltdowns.During the crisis, some government officialseven considered urging people to leave Tokyo.VOA's Steve Herman reported on the disaster.STEVE HERMAN: "I was among those near the atomic power facilityon the fifteenth of March when,unknown to the public, an estimated ten million becquerelsper hour of radioactive substances spewed from the three crippled reactors.For days, I and millions of people in Japanabsorbed significantly higher doses of radiationthan we normally would have been exposed to."Radioactive material spread over an area that includes some of Japan's most valuable farmland.Officials say eighty-one thousand hectares of farmlandare too heavily irradiated to let farmers plant rice.Vegetable, fruit and dairy farms also are affected.Japan's government has been seeking advicefrom foreign scientists about how to reduce the radiation levels.Some of the scientists are from the former Soviet Union,site of the nineteen ninety-six Chernobyl nuclear accident.No one has died from radiation as a result of the accident in Japan.Some scientists and government officials sayradiation levels even close to the disabled power plant are safe.But since the disaster,officials have faced growing distrust among the Japanese public.Japan also finds itself facing huge costs for cleaning upafter the nuclear disaster and for paying damages to victims.Before the accident, nuclear powerproduced thirty percent of Japan's energy needs.Now some people think the accidentwill be the end of the nuclear power industryin the world's third largest economy.Thorne Lay is a seismologistwith the University of California, Santa Cruz.He says engineers had underestimated the chancesthat a great wave could drown the emergency power systemsat the Japanese plant.THORNE LAY: "Those are mostly design weaknessesthat a good engineering think-through might say,let's put the backup power at very high elevationsso that it could not possibly get drowned out."Mr. Lay says scientists are better able to predict earthquake risksin some areas than they were in the past.Still, he says,they cannot provide decision makers with all the answers.THORNE LAY: "We will try to our best to give early warningif that's possible and set up emergency response systems,but ultimately individuals have to prepare themselves."In the United States, a nuclear plant is being built in Georgia.This is the country's first new onesince the Three Mile Island nuclear accidentin Pennsylvania in nineteen seventy-nine.Safety is not the only concern.The cost of building a nuclear plant and producing electricityfrom it is much higher than other sources of power.And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.