The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Still Casts a Shadow Over Japan
Twelve years after the Fukushima disaster, Japanese authorities have started pumping wastewater from the plant into the ocean. They insist there’s no danger to public health, but Japan’s neighbors are up in arms about the controversial plan.
An official demonstrates equipment for sampling water to analyze the concentration of radioactive tritium before discharging diluted treated water, as part of the process for releasing the treated water of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, on August 27, 2023. (Japan Pool / Jiji Press / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2011, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, roughly 250 kilometers north of Tokyo, was hit by a magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami. Three reactors stopped immediately, but the loss of electricity supply led over the following days and months to breakdown of the cooling system and to a series of hydrogen explosions and meltdowns of the cores of Reactors 1 to 3.
Prime Minster Kan Naoto feared for the worst. He faced the possible need to evacuate the whole Kanto region, including the Tokyo metropolitan area. Japan itself, its state and society, stood on the brink of catastrophe. That fate was only narrowly averted.
The legacy of the Fukushima disaster is still being dealt with today. This month, the Japanese authorities pushed ahead with a controversial plan to dump the wastewater from the plant in the ocean. It has provoked an angry response from Japan’s neighbors. In South Korea, protesters occupied the Japanese embassy with a banner that carried the slogan “The Sea is Not Japan’s Trash Bin.”
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