Eight years after the earthquake, a restaurant in Okuma could still be found exactly as it had been left when people evacuated ahead of the tsunami.
On May 11, they would finally be allowed to return to what was left of their homes and salvage important documents and keepsakes. Wearing radiation suits and able to take only what they could carry back with them on a bus, they had a scant two hours to sift through the wreckage and salvage what they could of their former lives.
More than 470,000 people on the Tohoku coast had been forced by the earthquake, tsunami, or nuclear disaster to leave their homes. Over the following year, many would return and rebuild. But the residents of Fukushima prefecture would be on the move for years to come.
lessons
Sociologists refer to the ways a culture remembers catastrophes like the tsunami as “disaster memory.” In places where natural disasters frequently occur, disaster memory saves countless lives. Survivors tell their children and grandchildren about the events. The stories become local lore, which often carries vital lessons about what to do when disaster strikes again. But disaster memory isn’t perfect. Over time, it fades. As decades pass without a major disaster, people begin to move back into the low-lying areas by the water. Fishermen want to be closer to their boats, builders want to take advantage of flat land near the shore, others just love the sea.
In Japan, memorial markers called “tsunami stones” remind the residents of many villages about the danger. A stone in the tiny village of Aneyoshi, in Iwate prefecture, sits at the high-water mark from a 1933 tsunami. It warns, “Do not build your homes below this point!”
In the village of Murohama, a shrine at the top of the town’s largest hill carried a dire warning. When a tsunami swept through in the year 869, many of the village’s residents had rushed to high ground there. But while the hilltop was high enough for them to stay dry when the first wave of the tsunami swept in from the sea, it was flooded when a second wave was funneled in over the land on the opposite side. Marking the place where the villagers were killed, the shrine alerted future generations to the false sense of safety offered by the hill. More than a thousand years later, villagers from Murohama knew to avoid the hilltop with the shrine and evacuated to a spot farther inland. From there, they watched as the shrine was swallowed by the tsunami.
Disaster memory spurs parents to teach their children about tendenko. It affects decisions about where to build houses and whether to build seawalls. It saved the village of Fudai. There, mayor Kotaku Wamura, who had seen the devastation caused by the 1933 tsunami, had insisted that the village’s floodgate be 51 feet tall. When construction on the supersized gate began in 1972, many townspeople protested, calling it a waste of money. But Mayor Wamura, remembering the 1933 tsunami and stories about the 1896 inundation, refused to budge. When the tsunami swept ashore in 2011, it brought a 66-foot wave to Fudai. But behind the floodgate, the village was safe. The massive wave overtopped the seawall but petered out after about 300 yards, long before it reached any buildings. Of all the villages on the Sanriku Coast, Fudai was the only one that remained intact.
But, while the morals of the stories told by tsunami stones and shrines are clear—don’t build near the shore, run for high ground after an earthquake, always be prepared for the next tsunami—the lessons from the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi are much harder to pinpoint.
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In July 2017, more than six years after the disaster at Fukushima, a tiny robot swam through the unit 3 building. At less than 8 inches long, with a cheerful red cylindrical body, a saucer-shaped head, and four whirring propellers, the Mini-Manbo was decidedly cute. But the little robot was tougher than it seemed. Cleanup workers had been trying to get a look inside reactors 1, 2, and 3 for years. But the reactor buildings were filled with water and radioactive debris. Five robots that had tried to reach the reactor cores had been destroyed by radiation before they got there. Operators had finally managed to find the fuel in units 1 and 2, but unit 3, which was covered by more water than the other two, proved more difficult. The Mini-Manbo, which had special cladding to shield it from radiation and sensors that would allow it to avoid dangerous radiation hot spots, was the right robot for the job. After three days of picking its way around underwater obstacles, it was finally nearing its destination.
The Manbo’s bright headlight cut through the pitch-black water of the flooded reactor building, recording a scene of jumbled metal and concrete. Flecks of debris floated in the soupy water, making it difficult to pick out shapes. Four operators steered the Manbo remotely, gathering critical information about the state of the reactor, until the robot finally found what it was looking for: the unit 3 reactor vessel. At its bottom, there was a giant hole where the melting fuel had eaten through the steel. Beneath that was a lumpy mass of cooled corium.
Although experts had long believed that the fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 had melted through the reactor vessels, it wasn’t until this moment, more than six years after the meltdowns, that they had proof. The Mini-Manbo gave the final confirmation and pinpointed the location of the fuel inside the building. Armed with that knowledge, TEPCO could begin to make plans to disassemble the reactors.
Beyond the reactor building walls, things had reached a kind of normalcy, although it was a very different normal than it had been before the tsunami. Once again, the plant bustled with activity. About 7,000 workers reported to the complex every day. But now they spent their days planning and carrying out the monumental task of cleaning up a radioactive disaster zone. Plant workers and visitors no longer needed to wear full radiation suits when they entered the grounds. All of the soil on the site, full of radioactive dust, had been paved over to prevent it from becoming airborne. In order to accomplish that, all of the trees and other plants on the grounds had been cut down. Before the disaster, part of the complex had been a bird sanctuary, and 220 acres of forest had to be razed in the cleanup. Where grassy banks had once lined roadways, an unforgiving expanse of pale gray concrete now stretched as far as the eye could see. The trees and other plants—estimated to total almost 3 million cubic feet of radioactive litter—lay in massive brush piles on the plant grounds, held in place by heavy sheets of white plastic.
Water storage tanks on the Fukushima Daiichi grounds in July 2018.
Closer to the reactor buildings, a thousand water storage tanks holding more than 250,000 gallons of radioactive water crowded the grounds. The frantic days of desperately trying to get water into the reactors had been replaced by a constant struggle to pump water out of them. Water was still being cycled through to keep the fuel cool, but groundwater also seeped into the buildings. If left alone, the groundwater would continue to flow toward the sea, carrying radioactive isotopes from the reactors with it, so workers pumped hundreds of gallons of water from the reactor basements every day. Although a decontamination process could remove some of the radioactive isotopes from the water, it couldn’t clean all of it, so most of the wastewater was stored in tanks. In 2013, about 300 tons of it was accidentally dumped into the ocean.
Engineers had built an underground ice wall around the plant in 2016. Nearly a mile long, it was made of pipes that carried a super-cooling liquid to 100 feet below ground. The cold pipes chilled the surrounding soil, creating a barrier that would stop groundwater seeping in from the west. They also drilled wells to pump groundwater out of the ground before it could reach the reactors. But even with those safety measures in place, the amount of water being stored at Fukushima Daiichi would balloon to more than 320 million gallons by 2020. More than 75 percent of that stored water still carried more radioactive isotopes than the Japanese government considered safe, and the need for water storage continued to grow.
There was no place for the contaminated water that had already been stored to go. In fact, there was no place for any of the radioactive debris that had been bagged or boxed. Like many countries, including the United States, Japan lacks a safe nuclear waste storage system.
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nbsp; By 2020, the reactors themselves looked very different than they had when the accident occurred. Workers were constructing a strong shell around unit 1. The unit 3 building was covered by a giant barrel-shaped cap. And unit 4 was hidden beneath a sleek gray-and-white frame, built to unload fuel from its storage pools. All of the new structures were designed to catch any radioactive debris that might be knocked loose as workers dismantled the crippled reactors and moved fuel from their storage pools to a safer location.
The extra measures were essential to keeping workers and the people of Japan safe, but they made the work of cleaning up the mess much more difficult. TEPCO estimates that it will take as long as forty years to fully dismantle the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Where the radioactive pieces of the plant will go after the cleanup, and what will happen to the towns and villages nearby, is still unclear.
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Several miles from the plant, the towns of Okuma and Futaba are still largely empty. For years, they fell within the Fukushima exclusion zone, an area that was too radioactive for the residents to return. The iodine 131 that spread across the area during the accident had a half-life of eight days, and it has largely decayed into safer elements; but cesium 137, with a thirty-year half-life, and Strontium 90, with a twenty-eight-year half-life, will likely take hundreds of years to completely decay.
Rather than wait, the Japanese government undertook a massive clean up, digging up radioactive soil from contaminated towns and hauling it away.
Radioactive debris is stored in plastic bags in the town of Naraha, which falls in the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Scattered around Fukushima Prefecture, 721 dumpsites are filled with mounds of black plastic. From a distance, these piles look like heaps of regular garbage bags. But the gigantic heavy-duty bags—each able to hold about a ton of trash—are packed full of radioactive debris. The government has yet to find a place to permanently store the soil it has scraped from the towns of Fukushima and until they do, the radioactive waste will continue to be a hazard. When a typhoon caused major flooding in the area in October 2019, hundreds of bags were swept into a river.
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In the years following the meltdown, organizations around the world, from the Atomic Energy Society of Japan to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United States’ National Institutes of Health, investigated the Fukushima Daiichi accident and attempted to explain its cause. As the reactors were melting down, it had been nearly impossible to keep track of what was happening inside them—operators couldn’t even be certain units 1, 2, and 3 had all melted down until the Mini-Manbo found the last piece of evidence. Investigators sifted through radiation readings and TEPCO reports, scrutinized meeting transcripts, and gathered seismic and radiation data. Most agreed that the massive waves that had knocked out the power at Fukushima Daiichi should have been anticipated. But it was clear that TEPCO, in building the plant, had not planned for a tsunami of that size. Instead, it had built its plant to meet the minimum standards required by law. Even worse, when it built the plant in the 1960s, the company had actually lowered the hillside by more than 100 feet, digging out soil to bring the reactors closer to the water. Had the plant been built on the hillside at its original height, the reactors would have been out of reach of the tsunami. Insufficient government regulation had made it easy for the company to build a plant that was vulnerable to disaster.
But there were also things that went right at the plant. Although the fuel in the storage pools in the reactor buildings had become dangerously hot during the long ordeal, another onsite storage system had come through with flying colors. Before the tsunami, 408 spent fuel assemblies had been packed into cement casks on the plant grounds, in what is known as dry cask storage. Although they were rolled by the waves, the casks remained intact, and the fuel inside was untouched. It was clear to investigators that dry cask storage was a safer alternative to fuel pools.
But many of these lessons were lost in a larger question for which there was no easy answer: Is any nuclear power safe?
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There’s something about radiation that makes it uniquely terrifying. A lot of that probably has to do with its invisibility. Dangerous radiation can’t be seen, felt, smelled, or heard, making it a particularly creepy hazard. And Japan, the only country to have been bombed with atomic weapons, has a particularly complicated relationship with radiation. In the months that followed the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, when other reactors around Japan went offline for maintenance, the government withheld approval for them to reactivate. By May of 2012, all fifty working nuclear reactors in Japan had ground to a halt.
The Daiichi disaster turned many Japanese citizens against the use of nuclear power. Here, people protest in Tokyo on June 11, 2011.
Japan wasn’t alone in reconsidering nuclear power. A year earlier, the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, had announced that eight German nuclear power plants would close. She promised to close nine more by 2022—making Germany a country without any nuclear power. Other countries followed suit.
On first look, this seems to make sense. The downsides of nuclear power are obvious when you consider Fukushima prefecture. Fallout from the meltdowns will affect the region for decades, possibly centuries. Once-green towns were scraped bare of vegetation and topsoil. In Iitate, the town with the highest levels of contamination, the cleanup cost came to about $1.8 million per household—and that didn’t include the surrounding forests, which were impossible to clean. In the waters next to the plant, radioactive cesium settled on the seafloor and continues to be found in fish today. Radioactivity from the accident can be found in trace amounts as far away as California and Oregon.
The necessity of evacuating residents during the meltdown prevented rescue efforts after the earthquake and tsunami in nearby towns, and it also has been blamed for hundreds of deaths as the sick and elderly were uprooted—or left to fend for themselves.
But despite the real and devastating effects of the meltdown, forms of power other than nuclear fission may pose a greater threat to Japan. Since 2011, the country has focused on using other fuels to generate electricity, including coal and natural gas. By 2015, nuclear power provided just 1.5 percent of the energy in the country, down from about 30 percent before the earthquake. About ninety coal-burning plants accounted for 32.3 percent of the country’s power, and the country had committed to adding thirty more.
Nuclear accidents can spread radioactive cesium, iodine, and strontium into the surrounding environment. But a properly functioning coal-burning plant spreads radioactive lead, uranium, radon, polonium, and thorium every day. These naturally occurring radioactive isotopes are found in the coal that is burned to make electricity. They become concentrated in fly ash, some of which escapes through the chimneys of coal-burning plants. Even worse, burning coal produces air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, that are real threats to human health. In a study commissioned by the environmental group Greenpeace in 2016, plans for new coal-burning plants on the outskirts of two major Japanese cities, Tokyo and Osaka, were estimated to have the potential to cause as many as 26,000 premature deaths over a forty-year period.
Coal plants are also a major producer of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global climate change. As an island nation with more than 18,000 miles of coastline, sea-level rise as a result of climate change is a very real threat to Japan.
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It remains unclear how many people will suffer long-term effects from radiation exposure as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns. A month after the tsunami, the accident was rated a 7 on the INES scale—a score shared with only the Chernobyl disaster. But the impacts of the Fukushima meltdowns were far less severe than Chernobyl’s. At Chernobyl, the nuclear reactor actually exploded, spewing material from the reactor’s core straight into the atmosphere. At Fukushima, while radiation did escape from the reactor vessels, the protective shells around the reactors remained inta
ct. In the end, about ten times more radiation escaped at Chernobyl.
There have not been any cases of cancer linked to exposure among the workers who fought to prevent the meltdowns in the days following the tsunami. Fukushima plant superintendent Masao Yoshida did die in 2013 as a result of esophageal cancer, but because it was diagnosed quite soon after the accident (cancers take years, and even decades to develop) it was not believed to have been caused by the meltdowns. But a lawsuit brought by more than four hundred sailors who were aboard the USS Ronald Reagan during the disaster alleged that they had developed cancer and other ailments as a result of their exposure. A Japanese worker who participated in cleanup efforts at the plant starting in 2012 received workman’s compensation for cancer as well, and in 2018, another cleanup worker died of lung cancer that was attributed to his work at the plant after the disaster. But the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that, although there might be a very small increase in cancer risk for babies and children in the worst-affected areas, there would likely be no effect on residents elsewhere in Japan. And the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) found that the amount of radiation exposure as a result of the accident was too low to cause cancers in anyone outside the plant.
By far the greatest damage to the workers who weathered the days and weeks of stress at the plant was done by posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a country where people identify closely with their work, the emotional fallout from the accident was enormous. Despite their heroic efforts to save the plant, many of the Fukushima 50 felt personally responsible for the meltdown. Public anger at TEPCO spilled over onto its employees, and most of the Fukushima 50 chose to remain anonymous. Anxiety, depression, insomnia, and feelings of isolation were common in the workers, as well as in the former populations of the towns surrounding the plant.
Meltdown: Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima Page 9
