The resulting meltdowns and explosions spewed radiation across a wide area of northeastern Japan and the Pacific Ocean in the worst nuclear accident since the one at Chernobyl a quarter century earlier.
Last week Alan Greenspan joined the blame game and outed the Germans as responsible for much of the US sub-prime crisis and the resulting financial meltdown.
The waves killed almost 19,000 people, while the resulting triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi forced 160,000 people to abandon their homes.
Nuclear-power advocates must be wondering whether it was truly necessary to choose the second day after the third anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and resulting triple meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in March 2011 to pinpoint the Sendai reactors as the first to restart.
This situation epitomises a stark truth: failing to remain relevant to your customers can result in meltdown.
In 2001, Argentina suffered a disastrous economic meltdown, resulting in the collapse of the middle class, slashed salaries, frozen bank accounts, out-of-control inflation and record unemployment.
The most obvious cause of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was the massive wall of tsunami water that swept the site clean of back-up electricity generation on 11 March, removing cooling capacity from reactor cores and resulting in serial meltdown.
How about that ho-hum three paragraph AP story run by the the Independent about the Olympic pool-size spill under Unit 1 resulting from the meltdown.
At Fukushima, a tidal wave swamped the diesel backup generators needed to cool the reactor, resulting in a meltdown of sorts, though one that fortunately didn't get bad enough to turn into a full-blown criticality excursion.
She saw the look of surprise on my face and explained that he was not happy with his place in the line-up for recess, resulting in a meltdown.
