The media moved on some time ago from Fukushima and left most of us in the dark about this unfolding nuclear tragedy. This selective amnesia suits Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who reports that all’s well with the Fukushima cleanup and the gradual return of resident refugees, as he looks forward to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
Not so, report others. In December 2015 Fukushima decommission chief Naohiro Masuda warned that the cleanup of the most complex industrial accident in history is far from solved: “Nothing can be promised … not even robots have been able to enter the main fuel-debris areas so far. … This is something that has never been experienced. … New science will have to be invented for the plant to be cleaned.”
To keep this paramount industrial accident from slipping into the dim past, let us examine the ongoing history of the Fukushima tragedy. Five years ago on March 11, the Great East Japan Earthquake and ensuing tsunami devastated northeast Japan, killing and injuring more than 20,000 people and crippling the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant. Three of the plant’s six reactors suffered hazardous nuclear core meltdowns and hydrogen gas explosions, releasing radionuclides into the air, soil and Pacific Ocean. More than 160,000 people were eventually evacuated from the region and most remain today “nuclear refugees,” living with the same trauma, fear, sense of displacement and loss of livelihood and social roots as war refugees. So difficult has been their fate that, by late 2015, 3,200 refugees had died of insufficient medical services, exhaustion of relocating, suicide and, likely, heartbreak.
In a callous move to keep schools open in Fukushima, the Japanese government raised the “permissible” level of radiation for children. Japanese children can now be exposed to 20 times more radiation per year than was previously allowed, a level comparable to the yearly limit for radiation workers.
Just one year after the Fukushima emergency, the Japanese government encouraged farmers from Fukushima Prefecture to return to their agricultural fields, claiming the area had been cleaned. Little more than a year later, the farmers confronted the government, once they had learned that the government was allowing the sale of their produce despite finding it was contaminated with radioactive cesium. One irate farmer dared the officials to feed cesium-contaminated produce to their children. Another conscience-striken farmer lamented, “customers think it’s clean, but I would not dare eat this produce myself. …We farmers feel guilty about selling it to others. … There is no longer joy in farming.”
For the past five years, radioactive water from the Fukushima site has poured via groundwater into the Pacific Ocean at the rate of 300 tons per day, the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history. Radioactive cesium, a carcinogen, which accumulates in animal, fish and human tissue, has been found throughout mainland Japan including hotspots in Tokyo, in fish off the coast of Fukushima (thus closing that industry), and in large migratory fish such as Bluefin tuna off the coast of California.
To stanch the flow of millions of gallons of groundwater from the immensely hazardous reactors into the ocean, the owner, TEPCO, has constructed a frozen underground wall around the radioactive reactor buildings to divert groundwater around them, a diversion they claim will reduce the contaminated groundwater to one-tenth its current volume. However, technological optimism is increasingly foiled by the unexpected: in September 2015, ocean surges from Typhoon Etau overwhelmed the site’s drainage pumps and hundreds of tons of radioactive water leaked from the reactors site and ultimately to the ocean. What, then, of more severe typhoons, undersea earthquakes, and the reality of sea level rise estimated to be anywhere from 3 to 15 feet within 50 years, for this oceanside plant? How will an underground seawall and onsite drainage systems survive natural disasters worsened by climate change?
In a December 15, 2015 interview, Mitsuhei Murata, former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, acknowledged, “it’s common knowledge Fukushima is not at all under control. In Fukushima, he said, the government has allowed residents to come back at an exposure limit four times that of Chernobyl. “This is a most serious humanitarian matter, if we think about the health of children. So I am asserting the evacuation of children is urgently needed. Murata concluded that Japan must seek an honorable retreat from the 2020 Olympics.
Echoing his concerns, former Prime Minister Hatoyama acknowledges that, while the government has claimed the Fukushima decommissioning and cleanup is proceeding well in order to hold the 2020 Olympic Games, it is a grave and uncontrolled situation. Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, under whose term the nuclear disaster occurred, concurs: “The accident is still unfolding.”
“Voices from Fukushima,” a reader’s play will be performed on Sunday March 13, at 2 p.m. in First Church’s Lyman Hall in Northampton to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima tragedy. The play invites you to listen to the voices of the people whose lives are directly affected by nuclear energy and to discover a connection between your lifestyle and their livelihood.
“Voices from Fukushima” is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Jeff Napolitano, AFSC, 413-584-8975 or JNapolitano@afsc.org.
Pat Hynes and Doug Renick are members of Nuclear and Carbon Free Future Coalition, which is performing “Voices from Fukushima” together with the American Friends Service Committee of western Mass.