Fukushima, planting the seeds of rebirth
Rights — di Mara Budgen
We visited Fukushima to speak with those working to rebuild their lives after the disaster of 11 March 2011. These are their stories, in a video reportage produced by LifeGate.
Fukushima, planting the seeds of rebirth
We visited Fukushima to speak with those working to rebuild their lives after the disaster of 11 March 2011. These are their stories, in a video reportage produced by LifeGate.
The scene is not post-apocalyptic, as one might expect. Fukushima, today, looks like a normal place – underpopulated, but normal. In 2016 we visited the prefecture on Japan's north-eastern coast, more than 200 kilometres north of the capital Tokyo, to speak with those working to start over after the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear disaster that on 11 March 2011 shook the country and the entire world.
What happened in Fukushima
The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
The epicentre of the magnitude 9.1 Tōhoku earthquake, which strikes at 14:46, is recorded off the eastern coast of Japan, 160 kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The tsunami generated by the seismic event reaches up to 40.5 metres of "runup" — that is, the height of the wall of water that crashes onto the coast above sea level — and floods 561 square kilometres of land. This tsunami was the principal cause of death throughout the tragic events: 15,891 people lost their lives and 2,584 are missing, according to Japan's National Police Agency.
The nuclear disaster
The floodwaters overtop the walls designed to protect the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) — Japan's largest electricity company — from the tsunami, triggering a blackout that knocks out the cooling systems of the six nuclear reactors at the coastal facility, including the emergency ones. The water levels in the cooling pools drop, exposing the nuclear fuel rods to the air; the rods' surface reacts with the air, causing the release of hydrogen, which in turn triggers explosions in reactors number 1, 2 and 3. In those same reactors, overheating induces meltdowns and the release of large quantities of radiation.
The event is known in Japanese as Fukushima genpatsu-shinsai: from genpatsu, nuclear power plant; shin, earthquake; and sai, tragic event. It was rated level 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Ines), the highest level possible and one reached only by the Chernobyl disaster.
The radiation
167 workers at Fukushima Daiichi received radiation doses above 100 millisieverts (0.1 sieverts) — the annual exposure limit above which cancer occurs more frequently — by the end of 2011, according to Tepco's own statements. The radiation release was such that in February 2017 Tepco reported levels of 530 sieverts inside reactor number 2.
The health effects caused by exposure, above all to the radionuclides iodine-131 and caesium-137, have not yet been established. According to scientific organisations such as Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, both American and both opposed to nuclear energy, Japan could suffer from 10,000 to 60,000 additional cancer cases as a result of the Fukushima nuclear accident. On the other hand, according to an article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the increase in thyroid cancer incidence recorded in children in the prefecture since 2011 is, for example, attributable to the fact that monitoring systems are now more thorough and frequent than those in place before the genpatsu-shinsai.
