The Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tokyo Olympics

“There was a very clear political agenda by Shinzo Abe, to use the Olympics to rehabilitate the impression of both Fukushima and the nuclear disaster domestically and globally,”

“It’s hard for me to support the idea of using the Olympics to present a narrative of recovery, where so much recovery remains to be done.”

The Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tokyo Olympics, Engineering and Technology, By Max Bernhard

 Wednesday, June 16, 2021  Before Covid-19 forced a delay, Japan’s government saw the ‘Recovery Olympics’ as a way to show the Fukushima nuclear disaster was under control. 10 years on, critics say many issues remain unresolved.

Members of the Japan women’s soccer team began the Olympic torch relay on 25 March this year, kicking off a four-month countdown to the Tokyo Summer Games after a year-long delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The brief opening ceremony – closed to the public and attended only by a small number of dignitaries – took place on a football pitch in J-Village. The sports complex lies just 20km south of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where a devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than 18,000 people and triggered a triple nuclear meltdown in 2011. J-Village was used as a base for the thousands of clean-up workers tasked with decommissioning the plant.

Long before the pandemic forced Japan to delay the Games, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pegged the sporting mega-event as a way to show that Japan had overcome the disaster and to promote reconstruction efforts in the region. Ten years on, questions over radiation in the area, its prospects for recovery, and the decommissioning of the reactor, as well as Japan’s overall energy policy, remain.

Abe’s successor Yoshihide Suga has said the Games would also be a sign of overcoming another tragedy. Going ahead with the event would be “proof that humanity has defeated the pandemic”, he said last year. But here, too, not everyone agrees. With less than two months to go until the official start of the Olympics, the Japanese government has recently extended its state of emergency in Tokyo and several other prefectures until at least 20 June. While the number of new Covid-19 infections has been going down and cases remain relatively low in an international comparison, a stretched-out fourth wave has strained the country’s medical sector.

Meanwhile, Japan’s vaccination efforts have been significantly lagging behind other developed nations. Less than 3 per cent of the population have been fully vaccinated as of 27 May 2021 and polls show that most of the public wants the Games cancelled. Despite that, Suga has been iterating his commitment to hold the Olympics in Tokyo this summer.

To assure members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that the event in Tokyo would be safe, then-Prime Minister Abe promised in his 2013 pitch to host the 2020 Games that the situation at the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant was “under control”.

Three years later, Junichiro Koizumi, a former prime minister and fellow member of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, called this promise a lie. “I think Abe understands the arguments on both sides of the debate, but he has chosen to believe the pro-nuclear lobby,” Koizumi, who became an outspoken critic of nuclear energy following the catastrophe, said at a press conference in Tokyo in September 2016.

“There was a very clear political agenda by Shinzo Abe, to use the Olympics to rehabilitate the impression of both Fukushima and the nuclear disaster domestically and globally,” says Sean Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist for Greenpeace East Asia, who has surveyed radiation in Fukushima dozens of times since the nuclear meltdowns happened.

Following the disaster, Japan halted all its nuclear reactors. Since then, it has restarted only nine out of a possible 42 across five power plants, while more than 20 are set to be decommissioned. Before the 2011 disaster, Japan generated about a third of its energy from nuclear power, and there were plans to increase that to around 40 per cent. The Japanese government’s current energy policy plans for 30 to 35 reactors operating by 2030, meaning about 20 per cent of the country’s power would come from nuclear energy. That target is also part of the government’s plan to significantly reduce carbon emissions in the country by the end of the next decade. This target requires at least a further 21 reactors to be back online.

One of the major obstacles to those restarts is public opinion, says Burnie. “The perception of Fukushima is that because you have an accident, you can’t rehabilitate, you can’t bring people back to live there, it’s not safe, and the decommissioning of the plant will take many, many decades, or centuries longer,” he adds. “So trying to create a new image, a new perception of Fukushima on the nuclear issue is really important [to the Japanese government].”

Changing public perception played a significant role in the government’s decision to host events in Fukushima and to use the framework of the ‘Recovery Olympics’, Burnie says, adding that the desire of the prefectural government and general society in Fukushima to communicate their region’s recovery was also a factor. “I think it creates a sense of slight schizophrenia because people want to have some good news … the Olympics were seen as perhaps a positive.”

At the same time, there was widespread criticism because the significant investments into the Olympics were seen as taking resources away that could have gone towards the area’s general reconstruction. The entire cost of hosting the 2020 Games is projected to be more than $15bn (£10.6bn), including $2.8bn for the postponement and an estimated $900m for measures to curb the spread of Covid-19. The Tokyo Games are the most expensive to date, according to a 2020 University of Oxford study that looked at Olympic costs since 1960. “There are still tens of thousands of people displaced, people still living in emergency housing. Obviously, the whole radiological situation is still complex and hazardous. There were mixed feelings about it,” Burnie says.

A year ago, when international visitors to the Games were still considered a possibility, some questioned whether it was safe for athletes and spectators to visit sporting venues in Fukushima or even Japan in general. South Korea reportedly considered providing its own food for athletes out of radiation concerns, although the move was seen as political by some.

Levels of radiation in Japan have decreased thanks in part to a massive programme by the government to remove the top layer of soil in affected areas. The contaminated soil is stored in millions of black one-cubic-metre bags that are piled up on temporary open-air areas scattered across the prefecture before being transported to interim storage sites. As of April 2020, about 6.7 million of the black bags were still stored in Fukushima, according to the Ministry of Environment.  

While the plant’s operator managed to stabilise the damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, melted nuclear fuel buried deep into the ground below the plant is still to be located and removed – an endeavour that is projected to take at least four more decades. Meanwhile, in April, the government approved plans to gradually release more than one million tonnes of contaminated water into the sea…………………

at the end of 2019 Greenpeace conducted radiation measurements around J-Village, where the Olympic torch relay would later kick off, and found several hotspots.

June 19, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, spinbuster | Leave a comment