Blue Glow in New York and at Fukushima Daiichi

Did you see the pictures of New York's blue skyline?

Today I read in the WSJ an account of how that blue light was produced:

Erin Ailworth (2018, Dec 28). Why Was the Light That Flooded New York City’s Sky So Blue?. The Wall Street Journal,https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-was-the-light-that-flooded-new-york-citys-sky-so-blue-11546023123?mod=hp_major_pos5

The eerie, neon-blue light that bathed the New York City skyline Thursday night resulted when tens of thousands of volts fed a fire at a electrical-utility substation. 

The voltage created an electrical field strong enough to strip electrons from atoms, and those freed electrons formed a soup of negatively and positively charged particles called a plasma, according to Scott Collis, an atmospheric scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago.

“Because you have all this energy in a plasma with all these charged particles running around, sometimes they will hit other atoms and that energy causes these atoms to emit light,” Dr. Collis said.

I recommend going to the WSJ article and taking a look at their diagram representing how the electrical field from the substation stripped electrons from atoms, creating a plasma state allowing positive charged electrons to circulate freely.

The article explains that collisions of these energetic electrons release energy with emitted light contingent upon colliding elements. In the case of the NY electrical fire, the article cites a "mix of metals" and oxygen and nitrogen in the air as producing the blue glow.

What struck me when viewing the imagery from the NY event was the similarity to the "blue glow" captured at the Fukushima Daiichi plant (in building 4) April 13, 2012 as illustrated below:

April 13, 2012