Fukushima Daiichi: 10 Years Later
Layout by Elle Bixby
The day started like any normal day for me. I woke up, got my son ready for the day, did our routine and then laid down to take a nap. It was then that I awoke in fear as I was being shaken from sleep. The picture frames that I had in my house fell to the ground, my son who was asleep beside me started screaming due to the loud crashing sounds from the frames and multiple other items falling in the house. I grabbed him and held him close, it felt as if we were in the middle of a building about to come crashing down. The tower that I lived in was physically swaying back and forth throughout the earthquake and several times after from the smaller after shock quakes. – Recollection of Lauren Mann, resident of Yokosuka, Japan on 3-11-11.
On March 11th, 2011, just over 10 years ago, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck just off the coast of Japan, followed by a tsunami whose waves hit 128 feet in some places less than an hour later. (Parshley) Nearly 20,000 people died or are presumed dead in the wake of this disaster, and the implications have been profound. (Detrow) The earthquake and subsequent tsunami destroyed entire towns. Even the very geology of the planet was altered; the main island of Japan shifted 8 feet to the east, and the length of a day is 1.8 microseconds shorter than it was before the quake. (Space.com) Yet one of the longest-lasting impacts of the disaster is the meltdown that took place at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which contaminated local ecosystems and forced the evacuation of more than 160,000 people. (Reynolds) 10 years later, some residents of towns in the Fukushima prefecture are still not able to return home.
So what happened at the Daiichi plant? Like many nuclear plants, both in Japan and abroad, the Daiichi plant was built close to the coast in order to provide easy access to water. The water acts both as a coolant and as a “neutron moderator” to slow colliding neutrons down to a speed where they can trigger chain reactions, a process that generates energy and its byproducts, heat and radiation. Because of these chain reactions, a nuclear power plant cannot simply be turned off, it is a gradual process that can take days to no longer emit heat. At Daiichi, the sea wall had been built to withstand up to a 33 foot wave and was able to deflect the first wave of the tsunami, which only reached 13 feet. The second wave, however, was more than 50 feet high when it landed. It breached the sea wall, flooding the plant levels that housed both control panels for water pumps and emergency backup power generators, preventing the plant from using any electrical power until more than a day later. From the quake, reactors across the country had automatically started shutting down, but at Daiichi, without the now-flooded backup generators to power the machinery that circulated cooling water to its six separate nuclear cores, residual nuclear decay heat continued to build up within the reactors of the Daiichi plant, even as it attempted to turn itself off.
Despite frantic attempts to prevent it, multiple explosions due to a buildup of hydrogen gas inside the reactors happened at Daiichi in the days following, and radioactive material spread throughout the local area. Initially, the government only evacuated residents living 3 km (1.9 miles) or less from the reactor site. After the explosions, however, the government expanded the evacuation zone to 20 km (12.4 miles), and eventually encouraged those living up to 30km to voluntarily evacuate as well. At the plant, radiation levels were measured at 400 millisieverts per hour. To compare, the average person is exposed to about 2.4 millisieverts of radiation per year, meaning that radiation at Fukushima Daiichi was 1.46 million times stronger than an average environment. Both seawater and drinking water had incredibly dangerous levels of radioactive iodine detected. It took until March 25th to bring the remaining critically overheated reactor core back to a controllable level, but the effort to do so had managed to accumulate a great deal of irradiated material and equipment, including contaminated seawater that is still stored at Fukushima today. (History.com)
For some of these evacuated areas, life has returned to a state of semi-normalcy since the disaster. But for many towns in the vicinity of the plant, the picture has not been so rosy. While the Japanese government has invested nearly 300 billion US dollars in cleanup efforts and rebuilding of infrastructure, the reality is that many residents have moved on. A 2020 survey conducted by Kwansei Gakuin University found that 65% of Fukushima Prefecture evacuees no longer wanted to return at all. 46% said they feared residual contamination of the environment and 45% said they had settled elsewhere (CNN). Only 2.4% of the prefecture is still an exclusion zone, or unsafe to live in, but those who have decided to return to the rebuilt towns are usually retirees, which makes reviving the economy a challenge. In the past decade since the disaster, Fukushima has seen a decline in population by 10% and only a growth in its economy by 8.1%. Compared to Miyagi, Fukushima’s neighboring prefecture, who had a population fall of only 2.5% and economy growth of 19% for the past decade, Fukushima is not thriving (Bloomberg). A lack of jobs in the area and significant health concerns may mean that no matter how much the Japanese government invests in repairs, they may very well be rebuilding ghost towns.
The health concerns are not insignificant. The criteria for an area to be opened up to returning residents requires that the detectable radiation levels drop below a certain livable standard, specifically below 20 millisieverts a year, which is the equivalent of 2 full-body CT scans. For many that is enough knowledge to comfortably live in the area, but for others there are still worries. A significant one is the long-term effects of living in an irradiated region. Many activists claim that the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) do not intend to fund and conduct health impact studies in Fukushima because the answers that they receive could be politically inconvenient for an energy policy that continues to favour nuclear power. Ayumi Fukakusa, a climate justice and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth Japan contends that “the government doesn’t really do research about [radiation risks.] Cases of cancer have increased among children … but they never admit the correlation or causation” (Al Jazeera). A big worry is the prevalence of thyroid cancer in children who both lived in Fukushima at the time of the disaster and those who are currently living in the former exclusion zones. In the first five years after the accident, researchers screened 571,000 children under 18, and found 187 cases of thyroid cancer. While these cases may not precisely correspond to just exposure, it is considered an officially statistically significant relationship between radiation doses and cancer in this group (NatGeo). Ayumi Iida, a mother who lives in the coastal city of Iwaki, about 40 kilometres (24 miles) from the destroyed plant, says she had to find ways to protect her children like sourcing foods from different regions, screening playgrounds for levels of radioactivity and by having her children tested each year for signs of thyroid cancer. “Our children have to be the main focus for the future of everything here,” she said (Al Jazeera).
Beyond the region’s lack of population, economic struggles, and health safety concerns, there is also the dilemma of what to do about the plant cleanup itself and the large quantities of irradiated materials that cannot be salvaged. The Japanese government plans to release the million metric tons of contaminated seawater that is currently stored at the plant back into the ocean. The water would be treated to remove the dangerous elements before being released, but some radioactive elements - like the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium - can't be removed. Significant dilution and a 30 year time period for release are also ways that the plan will be as safe as possible, but environmental and fishing groups oppose the idea. There may be no other answer eventually, as the holding tanks at the now-shutdown Fukushima Daiichi plant are expected to be full by 2022. What to do with the further 880 tons of highly radioactive uranium fuel, as well as the larger mass of concrete and metal that the fuel melted into during the incident could take another 40 years to solve (MSN), to say nothing of the bags upon bags of unusable irradiated topsoil that had to be collected and stored from the surrounding vicinity. The detectable amount of radiation in the region may have become low enough to live in, but it will be a much longer time before the uncontrolled environment – the forests, the hills, the riverbanks, the farmland – are under control from a radiological perspective.
In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi Crisis in 2011, many countries, including Japan, took a hard look at their dependence on nuclear power. Some chose to commit to discontinuing their use of nuclear power, like Germany. Other countries made different calculations. The cold facts are that no matter how safe you try to make nuclear power, there is always a potential for disaster. Human error played a minor role in Fukushima’s meltdown, primarily in the role of assuming that such a large tsunami was too unlikely to ever occur. Mother Nature has well and truly disillusioned us from that hubris.
And yet, humanity perseveres in the wake of difficulty. Fukushima Prefecture and the local towns like Namie are still underpopulated, but growing. Slowly, but steadily, it will recover, even if it never looks quite the same again. But the lesson of Fukushima Daiichi should be remembered the world over. Ayumi Iida, that young mother in Iwaki who worries about her children’s health would like the world to worry more about what could happen if nuclear power dependence persists. “This time we had an nuclear accident in Fukushima, but we don’t know where the next nuclear accident will be,” she concludes. “This must not be seen as an energy and environmental issue just for Japanese, but it must be considered by people all over the world” (Al Jazeera).
References
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Janos, Adam. “Fukushima Timeline: How an Earthquake Triggered Japan's 2011 Nuclear Disaster.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 5 Mar. 2021, www.history.com/news/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-japan-earthquake-timeline.
Jones, Philippa Nuttall. Why the Fukushima Disaster Signalled the End of Big Nuclear, 15 Mar. 2021, www.newstatesman.com/business/sustainability/2021/03/why-fukushima-disaster-signalled-end-big-nuclear.
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Soellner, Mica. Japan Might Release Radioactive Water into Ocean as Part of Fukushima Clean-Up, 13 Mar. 2021, www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/japan-might-release-radioactive-water-into-ocean-as-part-of-fukushima-clean-up/ar-BB1eyFeC.
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