There’s a touch of Hollywood in this dramatised account of the 50 workers who stayed at Fukushima Daiichi in an attempt to avert catastrophe Phil Hoad, @phlode, Tue 9 Mar 2021
ngerously high concentrations of politeness are observed in this dramatisation of the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Not only do most of the heroic “50” left behind to avert nuclear catastrophe constantly apologise for underperforming in acts of barely believable self-sacrifice, at one point a manager begs forgiveness for refusing to allow two employees to re-enter the radioactive zone after a failed first attempt. To the feckless western mind more likely to view Homer Simpson as the standard-issue nuclear power-plant employee, it’s a relief when – just for a second – a few Fukushima workers contemplate running away.
It is possible director Setsurō Wakamatsu has taken the Hollywood route in portraying the staff as so infallibly courageous – though Fukushima 50 is adapted from journalist Ryusho Kadota’s book, which investigated the response to the earthquake and tsunami in more than 90 interviews. Possibly to avoid lawsuits from Tokyo Electric Power Company executives portrayed here as selfish and shamefully caught on a back foot, everyone in the film is fictionalised – except for prime minister Naoto Kan, though he is never referred to by name, and plant manager Masao Yoshida. Yoshida crucially defies orders and allows the reactors to be cooled with seawater – which prevented meltdown and the possible devastation of Japan’s entire eastern seaboard. The reactors also must be “vented” for pressure manually by workers agonisingly selected for the task. Played by Ken Watanabe as a man having the ultimate bad day at work, the simmering Yoshida looks in need of a similar intervention.
Wakamatsu treats his account of these critical hours – the first direct depiction of the disaster, though Sion Sono’s Himizu (2011) was a poetic first responder – like a machine to be kept running at all costs. Often it consists of little more than technicians pelting into crisis rooms, adhering to the Akira school of screaming, with shocking gas-pressure read-outs. The civilian backstories are token, and though the film is critical of the brass, it doesn’t let this anger break into climactic outrage. Yoshida died in 2013 of unrelated oesophageal cancer: Watanabe’s big-shouldered presence makes this an ample tribute to the man, but the film could have been more than an easy clap for his workers.
Fukushima 50 is available from 8 March on digital formats.
Ten years after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, how has the Japanese government responded and what is it like for the people affected, still struggling to return their lives to some semblance of normality? Here is how things look:
Manuals are being distributed in schools explaining that radioactivity exists in nature and is therefore not something to be afraid of.
The government is considering getting rid of radiation monitoring posts as these send the wrong message at a time of “reconstruction”.
The Oversight Committee for Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey is discussing the possibility of stopping thyroid inspections at schools because they stress children out and overburden teachers and staff.
Depression and suicide rates among young people from Fukushima are likely to be triggered by being called “germs” and by being seen as “contaminated”.
Those who speak out about radiation are more stigmatized today than they were 10 years ago.
Those who “voluntarily” evacuated, recognizing that the so-called protection standards were not adequate for their region, are often ostracized from their new communities. They are seen as selfish for abandoning their homeland, friends and families “just to save themselves” and are bullied as parasites living on compensation funds, even though the “auto-evacuees” as they are known, received none.
Those forced to evacuate are also bullied if they do not now return, accused of not trusting the government and its assertions that it is safe to do so.
The taboo against speaking out for proper radiation protection and for compensation has grown worse as the rescheduled Olympics loom for this summer and Japan is determined to prove to the world it has fixed the radiation problem and beaten Covid-19.
On March 1, 2021, it took three judges all of 30 seconds to dismiss a case brought by 160 parents and children who lived in Fukushima prefecture at the time of the nuclear accident, and known as the Children’s Trial Against Radiation Exposure. The class action suit sought 100,000 yen per person in damages from the government and the prefecture, due to the psychological stress brought on by the lack of measures to avoid radiation exposure after the accident.
These are some of the realities uncovered by France-based Japanese activist, Kurumi Sugita, as she interviewed those affected and began to compile a graphic short story about her findings, entitled Fukushima 3.11 and illustrated by French artist, Damien Vidal. The booklet is produced by the French NGO, Nos Voisins Lontains 3.11 (Our Distant Neighbors 3.11).
Fukushima 3.11, a long-form cartoon strip, is told in the first person by the youngest of Sugita’s interview subjects, Fukushima evacuee, Suguru Yokota, who was 13 at the time of the nuclear disaster.
Suguru was also one of the plaintiffs in the Children’s Trial, and noted after the devastating dismissal, just days before the Fukushima disaster’s 10th anniversary, that “we cannot give up” and that “the court hasn’t issued a legitimate verdict.”
In 2012, Sugita had traveled to Japan with a research project she helped create, financed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research where she worked, to set up an investigation into Japan’s nuclear victims. A list of 70 interview candidates was put together.
“I met Suguru in 2013 in Sapporo where he was living alone after he moved there from Fukushima,” said Sugita. “I also interviewed his mother and they were interviewed once a year over six years.”
A schoolboy at the time of the accident, the book follows Suguru’s account of his experiences. He encounters the refusal by his uncle to believe the dangers in the early days of the accident, “a typical denial case,” says Sugita, and he is ostracized at school where he is the only pupil to wear a mask.
Suguru’s only respite comes when his mother, who is equally alert to the radiation risks, sends him on a “radiation vacation” to Hokkaido, the first time he encounters peers who share his concerns.
Back at school and feeling isolated and alone, Suguru studies at home instead, eventually leaving the region for a different high school and then college.
The book weaves in essential information about radiation risks, and the clampdowns by the Japanese government, which withdrew support for auto-evacuees claiming, as Suguru relates it, that “these families are not victims. They are responsible for their fate.”
The book was first published in the magazine, TOPO, whose audience is predominantly teenagers and which reports on topics of current interest.
“It appealed to us to address an audience interested in world events, but not exclusively the nuclear issue,” said illustrator Vidal. “We thought our comic strip could be read by all those — and not necessarily just teenagers — who want to understand what the consequences of the nuclear accident were, and how it affected the inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture.”
The book vividly brings home the psychological and emotional pain suffered by those who chose to recognize the true dangers posed by the Fukushima disaster, as well as the financial hardships and fracturing of families. And it exposes the depths of deliberate denial by authorities, more interested in heightened normalization of radiation exposure in the name of commerce and reputation.
Even as early as October 2011, an announcement is made that “rice produced in Fukushima Prefecture will supply school canteens again.” We see Suguru and his mother watching this news on their television, then the name-calling Suguru faces in school for bringing his own lunch. He is shown in the strip being called a “hikokumin”, which, explains Suguru, “is a really insulting word, used during the Second World War. It refers to people who are not worthy of being Japanese citizens.”
But that stigma has only become worse with time, Sugita says.
These days people are name-called “hoshano”. “Hoshano”（放射能) means radioactivity, but with a different Chinese character（放射脳) it means “radioactive brain – or brain contaminated by the fear of radioactivity”, she explains. And that is the slur in common circulation now.
Nevertheless, the book ends on a hopeful note. “Today,” concludes Suguru on the closing page, “I know I’m not alone. I hope other voices will be heard in Japan and around the world.”
It’s easy to say “never again.” But in order to ensure it, we must all continue to raise our voices, joining Suguru’s and others yearning to be heard.
Read the English language version of Fukushima 3.11 on line for free. A version is also available in French. Hard copies (in French only), may be ordered from Nos Voisins Lontains 3.11 for 8€ plus shipping costs.
The following is the Executive Summary from the new Greenpeace report. Download the full report.
As a result of a catastrophic triple reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on 11 March 2011, several tens of thousands of square kilometres in Fukushima Prefecture and wider Japan were contaminated with significant amounts of radioactive caesium and other radionuclides. The first Greenpeace radiation expert team arrived in Fukushima on 26 March 2011, and Greenpeace experts have since conducted 32 investigations into the radiological consequences of the disaster, the most recent in November 2020.
This report, the latest in a series, chronicles some of our principal findings over recent years, and shows how the government of Japan, largely under prime minister Shinzo Abe, has attempted to deceive the Japanese people by misrepresenting the effectiveness of the decontamination programme as well as the overall radiological risks in Fukushima Prefecture. As the latest Greenpeace surveys demonstrate, the contamination remains and is widespread, and is still a very real threat to long term human health and the environment.
The contaminated areas comprise rice fields and other farmland, as well as a large amount of forest. Many people who lived in these areas were employed as farmers or in forestry. Residents gathered wood, mushrooms, wild fruits and vegetables from the mountain forests, and children were free to play outdoors in the woodlands and streams. Since the disaster, tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their ancestral lands. The harm extends far beyond the immediate threat to health – as well as destroying livelihoods, it has destroyed an entire way of life.
Because of the government’s actions, many thousands of evacuees have been forced to make an impossible choice: to return to their radioactively contaminated homes or to abandon their homes and land and seek to establish a new life elsewhere without adequate compensation. This amounts to economic coercion and may force individuals and families to return against their will due to a lack of financial resources and viable alternatives. Given that these people lost their livelihoods, communities, and property as a result of a nuclear disaster they had no part in creating, this is grossly unjust.
ACRO 5th March 2021, The commune of Iitaté , located beyond a radius of 30 km, was evacuated late. The order to evacuate was announced on April 11, 2011 and the inhabitants had one month to leave ( read the follow-up of the first year of the disaster ).
During this time, those who did not leave the scene on their own were exposed to radioactive fallout. 29 residents of Iitaté filed a complaint against TEPCo and the state and demanded 200 million yen in damages because the authorities told them at the start of the disaster that it was not necessary to leave.
The lack of information about increasing radiation levels deprived them of their right to evacuate and left them exposed needlessly. They also claim that the evacuation of the
entire village that followed caused them to lose their homes and farms, destroyed their community and deprived them of their hometown.
France Info 7th March 2021, For four days and four nights in March 2011, hundreds of workers tried, sometimes risking their lives, to contain the damage from the earthquake
and tsunami that destroyed the Japanese nuclear power plant.
”……….March 11, 2011, 3:27 p.m. The ocean begins to hit the enclosure of the nuclear power plant. A first wave about 4 meters high crashes against the dike. But ten minutes later, a wave some 15 meters high swept over Fukushima Daiichi. The doors of the turbine buildings are not watertight: the generators, electric meters and batteries are flooded. Vehicles and rubble litter the roads. Two operators who had gone to watch the machines in the basement of reactor building 4 drowned.
On the second floor of the earthquake-resistant building, all the lights go out. It’s pitch black in this windowless building. Worse, the measurement indicators no longer work. Impossible to know the temperature and the pressure inside the reactors, therefore to know if the emergency cooling systems are still functioning. However, if the water level in a reactor drops, the fuel rods heat up and can melt until they pierce the concrete enclosure and cause a major nuclear disaster.
“We were left speechless”
“At that time, it was astonishment. We were all so devastated that we were left speechless,” recalls Masao Yoshida during an audition transcribed in A story of Fukushima (PUF editions), by Franck Guarnieri and Sébastien Travadel. The scarce information is communicated to the two external crisis units which are set up 250 km away, in Tokyo. One at the headquarters of Tepco, the company that operates the plant; the other at Kantei, the residence of the Prime Minister.
The teams take action. Two solutions are being considered for cooling the reactors: using diesel engine fire pumps or fire trucks which are already on the site. In the absence of a measuring system, the employees concentrate first on Reactor 2. What they do not know is that the back-up system is operating there. The emergency is actually located in reactor 1. Around 6 p.m., its heart begins to melt inside the containment……..
The teams take action. Two solutions are being considered for cooling the reactors: using diesel engine fire pumps or fire trucks which are already on the site. In the absence of a measuring system, the employees concentrate first on Reactor 2. What they do not know is that the back-up system is operating there. The emergency is actually located in reactor 1. Around 6 p.m., its core begins to melt inside the containment.
That’s when they were most irradiated”
Among employees, fear of radiation escalates. “The state of Reactor 1 scared young people,” said Ryuta Idogawa, one of the plant’s reactor pilots, in an interview with Yuki Kobayashi, a doctoral student in science and engineering of risky activities. Despite the danger, however, it is necessary to choose men to open the valves of the reactors manually.
Around 4 am, the injection of fresh water, stored on site in the event of a problem, is finally launched into reactor 1. “When we saw water coming out of the pipe and reaching the reactor, we all yelled, ‘Yes!’ and raised our fists in the air “, tells the Telegraph * Kazuhiko Fukudome, one of the firefighters involved in the accident. Workers are constantly refueling the trucks to operate the water pump. “I think that’s when they were most irradiated,” admits Masao Yoshida.
……… “We sent men and it exploded”
March 13, 2011, 2:42 a.m. While the situation in reactor 1 appears to have stabilized, it is the turn of the reactor 3 emergency cooling system to cease functioning. New operations must be relaunched, but fatigue begins to be felt. “How long can we continue to work without ever sleeping? The answer is 36 hours. That’s the limit for all men,” said Takeyuki Inagaki, group leader at the plant, in an interview with Yuki Kobayashi. This duration has just been reached by the employees, fed on rice bars and instant noodles. Even Masao Yoshida dozes off.
However, new operations resume before sunrise. Reactor 3 must be ventilated and cooled. After a few hours of hard work amidst the debris, the workers succeed in hooking up new pumps and watering the building to prevent overheating. Several of them are exposed to doses of radioactivity greater than 100 millisieverts (mSv), according to the Japanese nuclear safety agency, or five times more than the annual dose authorized in France for employees in the sector.
March 14, 2011, 11:01 a.m. A new explosion, even more impressive than the first, resonates in the heart of the plant. “HQ! HQ! It’s terrible! We have a problem on site number 3!” shouts Masao Yoshida, in a recording of the Crisis Staff. This time, it is the reactor building 3 which is blown up because of the hydrogen. The manager has to face his decisions: “I was sorry. We weren’t sure, but we thought it would not explode right away. We sent men and it exploded,” he admits. .
“Right after the explosion, when I learned that there were about 40 missing, I really iexpected to die. myself.”
Masao Yoshida, director of the plant before a commission of inquiry.
The explosion ultimately caused no death, but a dozen injured. It also has an immediate consequence for the plant: the destruction of the emergency cooling system of reactor 2. “I think that is the moment when I hit rock bottom. I saw us all dead,” says Masao Yoshida. On this Monday morning, the teams are overwhelmed. “I will never forget that afternoon. My stomach ached as if a block of lead was left there,” recalls group leader Takeyuki Inagaki.
”I ask you to sacrifice your lives”
In the middle of the afternoon, the director begins to envisage an evacuation of the few hundred non-essential employees of the plant. He orders that coaches be ready to leave in case of further complications. But shortly before 8 p.m. the hard work of the workers paid off. The injection of sea water begins in reactor 2. Reluctant to any evacuation of the employees, the Prime Minister addresses them during a night videoconference: “I ask you to sacrifice your lives.”
March 15, 2011, 6:14 a.m. It has been four days since the disaster struck, and employees must continue their endless battle against the elements. This time, it is a leak in the enclosure of reactor 2 which causes an explosion and damages reactor 4. Luckily, the explosion does not cut off the seawater cooling system of the first three reactors. The exhausted workers managed to stabilize these time bombs and contain what could have turned out to be a much more deadly disaster.
“There is a special bond between us. I cannot express it in words. I imagine that it is the camaraderie that can be between soldiers in time of war, will tell the Guardian later * l One of the engineers, Atsufumi Yoshizawa. In our case, the enemy was the nuclear power plant. And we fought it together. ” This Tuesday, reinforcements will finally arrive from the surrounding power plants to restore power supplies and build protective structures. The closed-door hell of Fukushima Daiichi power plant workers is over.
East Asia Forum 6th March 2021, Ten years after the world watched the explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Japan’s pro-nuclear advocates have lost policy
implementation power.
As part of the three-yearly energy policy review, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government needs to decide on the electricity mix for 2030 this year — including the future of nuclear
power. But given the need to maintain safety standards and public opposition to building new reactors, Japan’s nuclear target is realistically constrained to no more than an 8–10 per cent share of projected power needs.
Most 2011 quake, Fukushima crisis survivors back ending nuclear power
March 6, 2021 (Mainichi Japan) TOKYO (Kyodo) — About four in five survivors of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis in northeastern Japan support abolishing nuclear power generation immediately or gradually, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday nearly 10 years after the disaster.
Some 30 percent of respondents said all nuclear power plants should be abolished immediately, with 52 percent supporting phasing out nuclear power and eventually eliminating it.
The poll conducted in November in the three hardest-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima had 300 respondents and found that only 15 percent were in favor of restarting nuclear reactors and relying on them in the future.
Following a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit on March 11, 2011, the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant owned by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. suffered meltdowns.
Decommissioning work continues to prove difficult and evacuation orders are still in place in some areas around the complex a decade after the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
All reactors in Japan were halted after the nuclear crisis but some have resumed operations in recent years under stricter safety regulations. The government aims for renewable energy to account for 50-60 percent of overall electricity by 2050 while relying on 30-40 percent from thermal power and nuclear energy.
By prefecture, 40 percent of respondents in Fukushima supported an immediate exit from nuclear energy, higher than 27 percent in Iwate and 24 percent in Miyagi.
FOCUS: Decades-long challenge to scrap Fukushima plant by 2051 in a bind.By Junko Horiuchi, KYODO NEWS – Mar 1, 2021 The decades-long challenge to scrap the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, crippled by the massive earthquake and tsunami disaster that struck northeastern Japan in 2011, is becoming more complex as recent remote-controlled probes have highlighted just how damaged the reactors are.Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., operator of the six-reactor nuclear complex, aims to scrap the plant between 2041 and 2051. But critics have cast doubts on the schedule, citing not only the extremely high radiation levels, but problems associated with delayed probes and underdeveloped robots and other technology needed to extract an estimated nearly 900 tons of melted fuel debris.
Decommissioning of the plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, is crucial for Japan if it wants to stick to using nuclear power safely and show the world that the nuclear crisis is under control.
“It is likely that the roadmap will not be completed as scheduled,” said Tetsuro Tsutsui, a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, a group comprising academics and nuclear experts.
He added the “melted debris is mixed with fractured parts of buildings and concrete material and is highly radioactive, making it hard for robots to clear the debris.”
The scrapping of the plant involves the daunting decision on how to dispose of the huge amount of radioactive waste left as a byproduct. This has been made worse as no municipality offered to become the final disposal site when the plant was operating……….
“Nearly 10 years have passed following the Fukushima accident but with respect to the long decommissioning process, we are still hovering around the start line. We have a long journey ahead,” said Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori in a recent briefing.
“The most difficult step is the safe and stable retrieval of the debris but we don’t know what state it is in,” he added.
Despite the use of computer simulations and small-scale internal probes using remote cameras, data is scarce about the exact locations and other details of the melted fuel — crucial information to determine the retrieval methods and develop the appropriate technology and robots.
Robotic probes at the Nos. 2 and 3 units have captured images of large amounts of material that appear to be melted fuel, but attempts so far have been unsuccessful at the No. 1 unit.
TEPCO opted to start the fuel removal at the No. 2 unit as it has the best grasp of the internal conditions there but no time frame has been set for the two other units
In a setback for retrieval efforts, the company said in late December removing melted fuel from the No. 2 unit would be delayed from its initial starting period in 2021 by at least a year as the coronavirus pandemic has stalled the development in Britain of a robotic arm to be used for the extraction.
That robotic arm, however, can only extract a few grams of melted fuel debris at a time. To completely remove the hundreds of tons of melted fuel from the reactor larger machinery is required, experts say.
In another development that may affect the decommissioning process, a Nuclear Regulation Authority study group said in January a high concentration of radioactive cesium is likely to have accumulated in the lids of the containment vessels for the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.
The regulator’s findings in a new interim report draft on the Fukushima accident came as a shock because it was previously believed that most of the radioactive material remained at the bottom of the reactors in the form of melted nuclear fuel debris……..
TEPCO, whose biggest shareholder is the Japanese government, has not given an estimate of the costs for the debris removal, which would add to the 8 trillion yen ($75 billion) already forecast for the decommissioning process.
The utility and the government have also been grappling with the buildup of radioactive water, which is generated in the process of cooling the meltdown reactors………
According to Yasuro Kawai, another member of the commission, the government’s decision to release treated water into the sea is in fact the government’s attempt to minimize the impact of the Fukushima crisis and say dismantling work is on track.
“But the roadmap is nothing but pie in the sky,” he said.
The commission says it is more logical to keep the debris inside the reactors than to retrieve it and suggests constructing a shield around the reactors and postpone taking out the melted fuel until 100 years or 200 years later when radioactive activity levels have decreased.
On March 11, Japan marks a decade since a huge earthquake and tsunami left more than 22,000 people dead or missing and triggered the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Here is a brief timeline of events after the 9.0 magnitude quake, the biggest recorded in Japan’s history:
March 11, 2011: A 9.0 magnitude quake hits off the coast of northeast Japan, triggering a tsunami that devastates towns and villages. The tsunami swamps backup power and cooling systems at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, eventually causing meltdowns at three of six reactors. Two months later, TEPCO confirms meltdowns occurred.
Government declares a nuclear emergency and tells residents within a 3 km radius of the plant to evacuate. The evacuation zone is expanded in stages to a 20 km radius over the next two days. More than 160,000 people are eventually evacuated.
March 12: TEPCO begins injecting seawater to cool the reactors’ fuel rods. People stock up on groceries and supplies in Tokyo, about 250 km away, amid radiation fears.
Naoto Kan, prime minister at the time, says later he feared he might have to evacuate Tokyo.
March 16: Emperor Akihito gives a rare televised address expressing deep worry about the crisis.
March 22: Technicians working at the plant attach power cables to all six reactors and start a pump at one to cool overheating nuclear fuel rods.
April 4: Engineers release over 10,000 tons of contaminated water – about 100 times more radioactive than legal limits – that had been used to cool overheated fuel rods after running out of storage capacity.
May 20: TEPCO’s president, Masataka Shimizu, 66, resigns, taking responsibility for the nuclear crisis.
Aug. 26: Kan confirms he will resign.
Dec. 16: Japan declares damaged reactors are in a stable state of “cold shutdown”.
July 1, 2012: Kansai Electric Power Co restarts the 1,180-megawatt No. 3 unit at its Ohi atomic plant, Japan’s first nuclear reactor to come back online since the Fukushima crisis, despite public concerns about nuclear safety.
July 5, 2012: A commission appointed by parliament concludes Fukushima was a “profoundly man-made disaster” that could have been prevented, and mitigated by a more effective response.
Dec. 26, 2012: Shinzo Abe elected prime minister after his Liberal Democratic Party wins general election, ousting the Democratic Party of Japan, in power at the time of the crisis.
July 22, 2013: TEPCO admits that since the 2011 reactor breaches, radioactive water has continued to leak from the plant into groundwater, making it radioactive, with implications for drinking water and for the Pacific Ocean.
Sept. 7, 2013: In a bid led by Abe, Tokyo is declared the host of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, with a promise of showcasing a reconstructed Fukushima. Abe says the crippled plant is “under control”.
April 1, 2014: People begin to return to the 20-km exclusion zone around Fukushima as decontamination of the area is completed.
June 3, 2014: TEPCO begins work on an “ice wall” to slow the flow of ground water into the wrecked plant, but the buildup of contaminated water continues, slowing recovery efforts.
Nov. 5, 2014: TEPCO removes 400 tonnes of spent uranium fuel from a damaged reactor building, the first of four sets of used rods to be removed in a cleanup expected to last decades.
Feb. 7, 2018: TEPCO ordered to pay about 1.1 billion yen ($10 million) to 321 Fukushima residents for damages in a class action suit.
Sept. 5, 2018: Japan acknowledges for the first time that radiation at the Fukushima plant killed a worker there, ruling that compensation should be paid to the family of the man in his 50s who died of lung cancer.
Sept. 19, 2019: Former TEPCO chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, and former executives Ichiro Takekuro and Sakae Muto cleared of criminal charges of professional negligence resulting in injury and death in the only criminal case to arise from the crisis.
March 1, 2021: TEPCO said it had moved spent uranium fuel from a damaged reactor to a safer location – the second successful operation of its kind and the first to be carried out by remote control, because of the high radiation in the reactor building.
Decade After Fukushima Disaster, Greenpeace Sees Cleanup Failure, Bloomberg Green, By Aaron Clark,
Land identified for cleanup remains contaminated: Study
Long-term threat to human and environmental health remains
Ten years after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, land Japan identified for cleanup from the triple reactor meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi atomic power plant remains contaminated, according to a report from Greenpeace.
In addition, Greenpeace said its own radiation surveys conducted over the last decade have consistently found readings above government target levels, including in areas that have been reopened to the public. The lifting of evacuation orders in places where radiation remains above safe levels potentially exposes people to an increased risk of cancer, the report said.
On average, just 15% of land in the “Special Decontamination Area,” which is home to several municipalities, has been cleaned up, according to the environmental advocacy group’s analysis of government data. That’s despite the government’s claims that the area has largely been decontaminated, the group said.
……..While the government has been steadily lifting evacuation orders on towns since 2014, roughly 36,000 people are still displaced.
Seattle Times 3rd March 2021,The head of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant says there’s no need to extend the current target to finish its decommissioning in 30-40 years despite uncertainties about melted fuel inside the plant’s three reactors.
Ten years after meltdowns of three of its reactors following a massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi plant has stabilized but faces new challenges.
Nuclear regulators recently found fatal levels of contamination under the lids of two reactors, a test removal of melted fuel debris from one reactor has been delayed for a year, and a recent earthquake may have caused new damage to the reactors.
About 900 tons of melted fuel debris remain inside the plant’s three damaged reactors, and its safe removal is a daunting task that its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, and the government say will take 30-40 years to finish. The removal of spent fuel units from cooling pools is already being delayed for up to five years. But Akira Ono, who as head of the plant is also its chief decommissioning officer, said he doesn’t plan to change the current goal to finish decommissioning between 2041 and 2051.
Naomi Klein: how big tech helps India target climate activists, Guardian, by Naomi Klein 5 Mar 21, Companies such as Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian environmental campaigners
The bank of cameras camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement and involvement in an international conspiracy whose elements include (but are not limited to): Indian farmers in revolt, the global pop star Rihanna, supposed plots against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism and Greta Thunberg.
If you think that sounds far-fetched, well, so did the judge who released Ravi after nine days in jail under police interrogation. Judge Dharmender Rana was supposed to rule on whether Ravi, one of the founders of the Indian chapter of Fridays for Future, the youth climate group started by Thunberg, should continue to be denied bail. He ruled that there was no reason for bail to be denied, which cleared the way for Ravi’s return to her home in Bengaluru that night.
But the judge also felt the need to go much further, to issue a scathing 18-page ruling on the underlying case that has gripped Indian media for weeks, issuing his own personal verdict on the various explanations provided by the Delhi police for why Ravi had been apprehended in the first place. The police’s evidence against the young climate activist is, he wrote, “scanty and sketchy”, and there is not “even an iota” of proof to support the claims of sedition, incitement or conspiracy that have been levelled against her and at least two other young activists.
Though the international conspiracy case appears to be falling apart, Ravi’s arrest has spotlighted a different kind of collusion, this one between the increasingly oppressive and anti-democratic Hindu nationalist government of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the Silicon Valley companies whose tools and platforms have become the primary means for government forces to incite hatred against vulnerable minorities and critics – and for police to ensnare peaceful activists like Ravi in a hi-tech digital web.
The case against Ravi and her “co-conspirators” hinges entirely on routine uses of well-known digital tools: WhatsApp groups, a collectively edited GoogleDoc, a private Zoom meeting and several high-profile tweets, all of which have been weaponised into key pieces of alleged evidence in a state-sponsored and media-amplified activist hunt. At the same time, these very tools have been used in a coordinated pro-government messaging campaign to turn public sentiment against the young activists and the movement of farmers they came together to support, often in clear violation of the guardrails social media companies claim to have erected to prevent violent incitement on their platforms.
In a country where online hatred has tipped with chilling frequency into real-world pogroms targeting women and minorities, human rights advocates are warning that India is on the knife-edge of terrible violence, perhaps even the kind of genocidal bloodshed that social media aided and abetted against the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Through it all, the giants of Silicon Valley have stayed conspicuously silent. Their famed devotion to free expression, as well as their newfound commitment to battling hate speech and conspiracy theories, is, in India, nowhere to be found. In its place is a growing and chilling complicity with Modi’s information war, a collaboration that is poised to be locked in under a draconian new digital media law that will make it illegal for tech companies to refuse to cooperate with government requests to take down offending material or to breach the privacy of tech users. Complicity in human rights abuses, it seems, is the price of retaining access to the largest market of digital media users outside China.
After some early resistance from the company, Twitter accounts critical of the Modi government have disappeared in the hundreds without explanation; government officials engaging in bald incitement and overt hate speech on Twitter and Facebook have been permitted to continue in clear violation of the companies’ policies; and Delhi police boast that they are getting plenty of helpful cooperation from Google as they dig through the private communications of peaceful climate activists like Ravi.
“The silence of these companies speaks volumes,” a digital rights activist told me, requesting anonymity out of fear of retribution. “They have to take a stand, and they have to do it now.”
…………………. It is this quest for a political diversion, in other words, that helps explain how a simple solidarity campaign has been recast as a secret plot to break India apart and incite violence from abroad. The Modi government is attempting to drag the public debate away from terrain where it is glaringly weak – meeting people’s basic needs during an economic crisis and pandemic – and move it to the ground on which every ethnonationalist project thrives: us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, patriots versus seditious traitors.
In this familiar manoeuvre, Ravi and the broader youth climate movement were simply collateral damage. Yet the damage done is considerable, and not only because the interrogations are ongoing and Ravi’s return to jail remains distinctly possible. As the joint letter from Indian environmental advocates states, her arrest and imprisonment have already served a purpose: “The Government’s heavy handedness are clearly focused on terrorising and traumatising these brave young people for speaking truth to power, and amounts to teaching them a lesson.”
The still wider damage is in the chill the entire toolkit controversy has placed over political dissent in India – with the silent complicity of the tech companies that once touted their powers to open up closed societies and spread democracy around the world. As one headline put it, “Disha Ravi arrest puts privacy of all Google India users in doubt”.
Indeed, public debate has been so deeply compromised that many activists in India are going underground, deleting their own social media accounts to protect themselves. Even digital rights advocates are wary of being quoted on the record. Asking not to be named, a legal researcher describeda dangerous convergence between a government adept at information war and social media companies built on maximising engagement to mine their users’ data: “All of this stems from a stronger weaponisation of social media platforms by the status quo, something that was not present earlier. This is further aggravated by the tendency of these companies to prioritise more viral, extremist content, which allows them to monetise user attention, ultimately benefiting their profit motives.”…………..
The new code is being introduced in the name of protecting India’s diverse society and blocking vulgar content. “A publisher shall take into consideration India’s multi-racial and multi-religious context and exercise due caution and discretion when featuring the activities, beliefs, practices, or views of any racial or religious group,” the draft rules state.
In practice, however, the BJP has one of the most sophisticated troll armies on the planet, and its own politicians have been the most vociferous and aggressive promotors of hate speech directed at vulnerable minorities and critics of all kinds. To cite just one example of many, several BJP politicians actively participated in a misinformation campaign claiming that Muslims were deliberately spreading Covid-19 as part of a “Corona Jihad”.
What a code like this would do is enshrine in law the double digital vulnerability experienced by Ravi and other activists: they would be unprotected from online mobs revved up by a Hindu nationalist state, and they would be unprotected from that same state when it sought to invade their digital privacy for any reason it chose……….
The new code, which will impact all digital media, including streaming and news sites, is set to take effect within the next three months. A few digital media producers in India are pushing back. Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of the Wire,tweetedlast Thursday that the “lethal” new code is “aimed at killing the independence of India’s digital news media. This attempt to arm bureaucrats with the power to tell the media what can and can’t be published has no basis in law.” ………….
Do not expect portraits of courage from Silicon Valley, however. Many US tech executives regret early decisions, made under public and workerpressure, to refuse to cooperate with China’s apparatus of mass surveillance and censorship – an ethical choice, but one that cost companies like Google access to a staggeringly large, lucrative market. These companies appear unwilling to make the same kind of choice again. As the Wall Street Journal reportedlast August, “India has more Facebook and WhatsApp users than any other country, and Facebook has chosen it as the market in which to introduce payments, encryption and initiatives to tie its products together in new waysthat [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg has said will occupy Facebook for the next decade.”
For tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Zoom, India under Modi has heralded a harsh moment of truth. In North America and Europe, these companies are going to great lengths to show that they can be trusted to regulate hate speech and harmful conspiracies on their platforms while protecting the freedom to speak, debate, and disagree that is integral to any healthy society. But in India, where helping governments hunt and imprison peaceful activists and amplify hate appears to be the price of access to a huge and growing market, “all of those arguments have gone out the window,” one activist told me. And for a simple reason: “They are profiting from this harm.”https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/mar/04/how-big-tech-helps-india-target-climate-activists-naomi-klein
Decade after Fukushima disaster survivor looks back | Tomioka just 10 km from wrecked nuclear plant
Wall St Journal 3rd March 2021. At a seaside nuclear-power plant here, a concrete wall stretching a mile along the coast and towering 73 feet above sea level offers protection
gainst almost any conceivable tsunami. Two reactors are ready to start splitting atoms again to heat water into steam and generate power, the operator has told regulators.
Yet despite safety measures set to cost nearly $4 billion, the Hamaoka plant hasn’t produced a single kilowatt since May 2011, and it has no target date to restart.
The paint on billboards is fading and an old “no trespassing” sign outside the barbed wire lies on the ground—signs of creeping neglect. Even a local antinuclear leader, Katsushi Hayashi, said he spent more time these days fighting an unrelated rail line in the mountains, confident that regulators and public opinion wouldn’t let the plant open any time soon.
“Fukushima gave us all the proof we need. It’s dangerous,” Mr. Hayashi said. A decade after Fukushima, just nine reactors in Japan are authorized to operate, down from 54 a decade ago, and five of those are currently offline owing to legal and other issues.
All of Fukushima prefecture’s reactors are closed permanently or set to do so. Chubu Electric Power Co. , owner of the Hamaoka plant, declined to make an executive available for comment. It has formally applied to reopen two reactors at the plant and told regulators that new measures such as the wall, mainly completed in 2015, make them safe to operate.
Nuclear Power’s Prospects Cool a Decade After Fukushima Meltdowns
Disaster at the Japanese reactors marked a turning point for an industry that once promised to give the world a nearly unlimited source of energy WSJ, By Peter Landers, March 3, 2021
OMAEZAKI, Japan—At a seaside nuclear-power plant here, a concrete wall stretching a mile along the coast and towering 73 feet above sea level offers protection against almost any conceivable tsunami. Two reactors are ready to start splitting atoms again to heat water into steam and generate power, the operator has told regulators.
Yet despite safety measures set to cost nearly $4 billion, the Hamaoka plant hasn’t produced a single kilowatt since May 2011, and it has no target date to restart. The paint on billboards is fading and an old “no trespassing” sign outside the barbed wire lies on the ground—signs of creeping neglect.
Even a local antinuclear leader, Katsushi Hayashi, said he spent more time these days fighting an unrelated rail line in the mountains, confident that regulators and public opinion wouldn’t let the plant open any time soon. “Fukushima gave us all the proof we need. It’s dangerous,” Mr. Hayashi said.
The triple meltdowns at Japanese nuclear reactors in Fukushima after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami marked a turning point in an industry that once dreamed of providing the world with nearly unlimited power.
A decade after Fukushima, just nine reactors in Japan are authorized to operate, down from 54 a decade ago, and five of those are currently offline owing to legal and other issues. All of Fukushima prefecture’s reactors are closed permanently or set to do so. Chubu Electric Power Co. , owner of the Hamaoka plant, declined to make an executive available for comment. It has formally applied to reopen two reactors at the plant and told regulators that new measures such as the wall, mainly completed in 2015, make them safe to operate…… (subscribers only)https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-powers-prospects-cool-a-decade-after-fukushima-meltdowns-11614767406
The Olympic Games, dubbed the “reconstruction Olympics”, should allow Japan to move on from the Fukushima tragedy. The region, a symbol of the 2011 disaster, has officially been cleaned up but many problems remain, such as radioactivity and “forbidden cities”. Over the course of several months, our reporters followed the daily lives of the inhabitants of this “cursed” region.
In recent months, Japanese authorities have been working hard to finish rebuilding the Fukushima region in time for the Summer Games. This huge reconstruction and decontamination project is never-ending and is expected to cost nearly €250 billion.
Although the work undertaken over the past 10 years is colossal and the region is partly rebuilt, it’s still not free from radioactivity. The NGO Greenpeace has detected radioactive hotspots near the Olympic facilities. And at the Fukushima power plant, Tepco engineers continue to battle against radioactive leaks. They also face new issues such as contaminated water, which is accumulating at the site and poses a new-fangled problem for Japan. Our reporters were able to visit the notorious nuclear power plant.
They bring us a chronicle of daily life in Fukushima, with residents determined to revive their stricken region.
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