The official investigation into the Fukushima disaster called it a “made in Japan” failure by a nuclear industry that suffered from regulatory capture, faulty leadership, defective engineering, and ruinous cost-saving measures, such as failing to build an adequate seawall or waterproofed generators and pumps.

BUY: Return to Fukushima

The disaster at Three Mile Island in the United States decades earlier could be dismissed as human error. The disaster at Chernobyl could be dismissed as the product of inferior Soviet technology. 

Fukushima was different. An advanced industrial country running fifty-four nuclear reactors, supplying a third of the Japan’s electricity, was devastated by the world’s worst industrial accident. 

Fireball

The final bill for containing the destroyed reactors, storing the waste, and rebuilding parts of the nuclear exclusion zone will be more than a trillion dollars. 

This is one quarter of Japan’s economy, a devastating blow to an island nation that is currently ignoring its history and geology as it pushes to restart the nuclear reactors that it closed fifteen years ago.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami killed twenty thousand people along Japan’s eastern coast. The earthquake and wave also destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. 

Three of the plant’s six nuclear reactors melted down and exploded. A fourth reactor, about to be reloaded, also exploded in a hydrogen fireball, while Japan prepared to evacuate Tokyo, lying a hundred miles to the south. 

Melted

The "Fukushima fifty", a suicide squad of older men willing to expose themselves to lethal doses of radiation, flooded the melted reactors with seawater. 

But Tokyo was also saved by luck. Westerly winds blew most of the radioactive gases and particles out to sea. One hundred and sixty thousand people were evacuated from around the destroyed reactors. 

Today, a nuclear exclusion zone the size of New York remains uninhabited, filled with ghost towns and radioactive pigs and mushrooms too contaminated to eat.

Four thousand workers struggle daily to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors are so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. 

No one knows where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals. The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than a thousand tanks that reached capacity in 2023. 

Dose

This cooling water, supposedly cleaned but actually contaminated with sixty-two radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium, is being released into the Pacific Ocean. 

Two fuel pools packed with nuclear cores have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of Units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to topple into the ocean.

In 2018, the Japanese government ended housing subsidies for the tens of thousands of people who remain displaced from their homes. 

The push to resettle Fukushima’s red zone began in 2011, when the allowable dose limits for radiation exposure were raised twentyfold, from one millisievert per year to twenty. 

One millisievert per year remains the allowable dose for the rest of Japan. Twenty millisieverts per year was formerly the dose allowed for workers in nuclear power plants. 

Spike

The difference explains why women, particularly women with young children, have resisted returning to Fukushima, regardless of the new schools - and subsidies for everything from eating out in local restaurants to gym membership. 

Decontaminating Fukushima included a Pharaonic project to remove and bag all the topsoil containing cesium-137 and other radioactive elements. 

One hundred thousand workers in Tyvek suits and masks swarmed over Fukushima’s towns and rice paddies, scraping up five centimeters of soil and piling it into great pyramids of black plastic garbage bags. 

Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter. 

Dumped

So, too, do the winter storms that wash radioactive material down from the mountains and forests that cover three-quarters of Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone. 

Most of the soil that was scraped up and bagged has been re-deposited into a dump built on the cliff behind the destroyed reactors. This facility separates out the most radioactive elements and sequesters them in concrete bunkers. 

Soil measuring less than 8,000 becquerels per kilo, which the ministry of the environment calls “happy soil,” is readied for shipment across the country, to be used in landfills and construction. 

A load of happy soil, described as “revitalized and strong,” was recently dumped into the flower beds in front of the prime minister’s office in Tokyo. 

Earthquakes

“This is a dangerous level of radioactivity,” says Yukio Shirahige, who worked for thirty-six years as a cleaner mopping up spills at Fukushima Daiichi. “At these levels you have to wear gloves and protective gear. If you had any cuts or open wounds, you were taken off the job.” 

While happy soil can measure up to 8,000 becquerels per kilo, the dose limit for food in Japan is 100 becquerels per kilo.

Japan adopted this strategy to reduce the “heavy burden” on Fukushima and speed the area’s recovery, but Shirahige suspects another motive. “If all of Japan is contaminated, then Fukushima will appear to have recovered because it looks just like the rest of the country.”

With over a thousand earthquakes a year and an ongoing disaster at Fukushima, Japan would be wise to wise to think twice about restarting its nuclear fleet. 

This Author

Thomas A Bass is a professor of English and journalism at the University at Albany. He is the author of eight books, including Return to Fukushima.