11 March 2011 (in brief “3/11”) turned out to be a crucial date for Japan and the Pacific Region. On this Thursday afternoon, at 2.46 pm local time, Japan’s east coast fell victim to the Tōhoku earthquake. The earth shook for several minutes, with its epicentre laying about 370 km from Tokyo in the Pacific Ocean. The earthquake caused a huge Tsunami, resulting in a double catastrophe for the Japanese.
As a consequence of both, earthquake and tsunami, several nuclear power plants suffered significant damage. A plant most affected was Fukushima-Daiichi. While the station was more or less able to withstand the earthquake, the following tsunami heavily damaged the electricity grid and destroyed the necessary grid connection to provide electric energy in sufficient amounts to the plant’s cooling system. As anticipated, emergency diesel generators jumped in – but their fuel ran out quickly. In the course of the following days, three of six nuclear reactors suffered meltdowns. In reactor four, serious damage through hydrogen explosions occurred. The catastrophe had begun.
So what happened? In essence, safety considerations were not taking exceptional disasters of the scope of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami into account. In other words, the magnitude of the earthquake and the height of the tsunami were simply greater than the maximum anticipated strain on the nuclear power plant. The plant operator, TEPCO, did not consider an earthquake of magnitude 9 to be a “credible event” in the Japan Trench, as the IAEA concluded in its 2015 report on the accident. The company did not find it economically justifiable to invest in measures to protect the plant against such an event. Per Högselius, professor for history of technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, explains that the company did consult historical earthquake and tsunami reports, but the conclusion was that although immense tsunamis did occur from time to time along the Japanese coast, no tsunami higher than 5.7 meters had ever been recorded in the particular stretch of coast where the Fukushima nuclear station was located.
Soon, a Japanese parliamentary panel declared that the disaster was not only a natural one. It was also a human-made one, because official institutions believed that measures taken were sufficient and that the cost-safety calculations were appropriate. This is correct, since humans created this envirotechnical system, in which the nuclear power plant was integrated into the waters of the Pacific Ocean. As Charles Perrow has taught us in Normal Accidents, every technological system that incorporates complicated and potentially risky machines with the operation of human actors, will inevitably lead to incidents and accidents as time progresses. Time was the crucial variable, both in TEPCO’s risk assessment and in reality.
In July 2022 the district court in Tokyo closed a lawsuit against four former heads of TEPCO, investigating their potential negligence in said safety assessments. The court found them guilty and charged them with privately having to pay 13 trillion yen in retribution, about $95 billion at that time. In the opinion of the court, these officials could have prevented the catastrophe if they would have acted appropriately with safety and not profits in mind.
For TEPCO water was both a saviour that made it possible to re-establish the cooling of the molten reactor cores and a medium of contamination at the same time. Currently, the operator struggles with securing the remains of the destroyed reactor cores and storing them somehow safely on land to facilitate decommissioning efforts. Unfortunately, high levels of radioactivity prevent a lot that needs to be done. The reactor cores need permanent cooling to prevent further uncontrolled nuclear reactions. Due to the initial destruction of the cooling circuits and the following makeshift replacements, water was not kept within and reused as coolant, as it leaked into the reactor building. From there, it was pumped out, treated and stored outside the plant. On several occasions, it was ultimately dumped into the Pacific. At the time of writing, no end to this problem is in sight and TEPCO has announced to soon release a significant amount of contaminated water into the ocean.
In the meantime, decontamination work has been conducted in many places in Fukushima prefecture. A huge amount of top soil, saturated with toxic radioisotopes, was dug up and stored in plastic bags on dumping sites. These sites are usually out in the open and expose these bags to the elements, contributing to their deterioration.
Tomoko Otake from the Japan Times writes that “[s]ince 2015, the Interim Storage Facility, which straddles the towns of Okuma and Futaba and overlooks the crippled plant, has safely processed massive amounts of radioactive soil — enough to fill 11 Tokyo Domes — in an area nearly five times the size of New York’s Central Park.” This site unpacks the black plastic bags, filters the soil, and buries it in prepared 15-metre-deep pits. Afterwards, the pit is filled with uncontaminated earth and sealed with a patch of grass. “Areas where the work has been completed look like soccer fields”, writes Otake.
While with this method the contaminated soil is out of sight, it is unsure where the buried radioisotopes will end up. These prepared pits have a drainage system aimed at preventing toxins to enter the groundwater acquifers. That being written, it is unclear how underground migration will eventually turn out. Local residents seem to be in opposition to this practice.
On both spheres, on land and in water, Japanese authorities and TEPCO struggle to get a grip with the ongoing contamination stemming from the destroyed nuclear power plant. Even worse – and here a strong parallel to the Chernobyl exclusion zone can be seen – once contained radioisotopes do not stay at a given location. They recycle through food chains and the environment until they have decayed. Wind, fire, water, erosion, and the life cycle of living beings transport radioisotopes to unforeseen places and accumulate in changing hotspots that in turn might become dangerous to humans. The contamination of ground water, ocean water and soil inevitably leads to a contamination of foodstuff and drinking water. This in turn leads to radioisotopes being incorporated into human bodies, where they make the host sick in multiple and varying ways.
Unfortunately, the meltdowns have taken place twelve years ago and nothing can change that. It is now paramount to find a way to safely decommission the destroyed reactors and by doing so to stop the continuous spread of further contamination, for example through the release of radioactive water into the sea. I hope that that world will continue to support Japan in a joint effort to prevent the worst effects of the catastrophe and to at least find a way to stop the continuous practice of producing more and more contaminated scores of water. This is a problem that concerns everyone and TEPCO is clearly not able to solve it on its own.
As we commemorate today’s 12th anniversary, we should remember that tremendous resources will be needed to contain this problem. It also manifests a stern warning sign that these sorts of accidents – whether it was Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima on 3/11 – might repeat themselves at one of the about 500 civil nuclear power plants around the world. Living on an earth that desperately has to tackle climate change, proponents of nuclear energy readily point to this power source as a potential tool to help transform our energy systems into greenhouse-gas-neutral assemblages. I doubt this narrative, as there is no final storage or any anticipated solution for radioactive waste, no comprehensive way to deal with disasters, and no understanding of what it means to care for toxic materials for centuries and millennia to come. If anything good could come out of 3/11, then maybe it can help us to reflect what we are doing to the planet and to ourselves.
Further reading:
Bothe, Julian a. Friedrich, Lisa Marie: Weder Kohle noch Atom, in .ausgestrahlt, 28 February 2023.
Polleri, Maxime: Our contaminated future, in Aeon, 15 December 2022.
SVT.se: Tolv år efter olyckan – kärnkraften åter på frammarsch i Japan, 10 March 2023.
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Achim Klüppelberg 