In 2011, Japan was ravaged by a magnitude 9 earthquake, followed by a massive tsunami.
In Fukushima prefecture, TEPCO’s Daiichi Nuclear Reactor exploded and exposed the surrounding
area to radiation.
Now, this radioactive material is seeping into the Pacific ocean, and it has made the
surrounding areas into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
Few people outside of Japan know what really happened at Fukushima, or how the consequences
of this one disaster could potentially affect the whole world.
On today’s Geographics, we bring you the story of Fukushima.
Before The Disaster Japan is an island nation located along the
volcanic “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific Basin.
Because of where it’s located, the country experiences earthquakes and tsunamis on a
regular basis.
Most towns along the coast have sea walls, and all buildings are equipped to deal with
frequent tremors every single year.
Before 2011, some of the worst earthquakes on record were magnitude 6 or 7.
The Fukushima Prefecture is located in Northern Japan.
In the 5th Century, the people of Fukushima built The Shirakawa Barrier and the Nakoso
Barrier to protect themselves from citizens of Northern Japan.
There were several different ethnic groups in Japan at the time, and the residents of
Fukushima felt that their people were far more civilized, and they wanted to protect
pure Japanese blood.
Today, that ancient barrier is still standing, and it serves as one of the area’s main
tourist attractions.
Beginning in the 1870’s, the Hamadōri region of Fukushima became the hub of Japan’s coal
mining industry.
This was the region’s main resource for years, aside from farming.
The vast majority of Fukushima is filled with forests and farms, and most people lived a
simple life generation after generation.
After World War II, Fukushima struggled compared to the rest of the country.
Western technology made its way into the major cities, and Tokyo wanted to convert to electricity.
In the 1950’s, TEPCO energy began creating an electrical grid to power homes, instead
of coal.
And by the 1970’s, TEPCO decided to build nuclear power plants in the town of Okuma,
Fukushima.
By 1979, both nuclear facilities called “Daiichi”- number one- and “Daini”- number two, were
both complete.
The Day Of Infamy On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake
struck northern Japan.
It was the worst earthquake that has ever occurred in all of Japanese history, and one
of the top 5 in the entire world.
It lasted for 6 minutes, which was far longer than the average quake.
It triggered a tsunami that traveled at 800km, or 500 miles per hour, and reached maximum
heights of 133 feet or 40.5 meters, before crashing on the shores at 50 feet, or 15 meters.
The tsunami completely destroying sea walls that were less than 20 feet or 6 meters high,
and wiped out entire cities in a matter of seconds.
Normally, these tsunamis only affect the coast lines, but this water flooded 6 miles or 9.7
kilometers inland.
A total of 18,430 people were killed, or went missing throughout Japan.
This by itself would have made it one of the greatest natural disasters in history.
But what everyone remembers, of course, is the nuclear disaster.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company- TEPCO for short- had their nuclear power plants located
along the shoreline, which made them vulnerable to a disaster that no one would have anticipated.
During the earthquake, lights were crashing, and everything went dark.
TEPCO employees in the central control room lost all communication with the outside world.
The men had emergency flashlights at their stations, which only slightly illuminated
this windowless facility.
They followed the protocol for an emergency, and successfully managed to bring all of the
active reactors offline at both the Daiichi and Daini facilities, but the issue was far
more complicated than that.
Uranium splits apart inside of the reactor, and they release neutrons.
Nuclear fission continues, and every time a neutron blasts off into uranium, it continues
to split, and it lets off an immense amount of heat.
This uranium is held inside of “fuel rods”, and when a reactor is shut down, they insert
“control rods” which help to stop the chain reaction.
This emergency shutdown is called “SCRAM”, complete with the big red button you have
seen in the movies.
However, it becomes so hot, that the nuclear reactor has lingering “decay heat”.
This takes up to 24 hours for these nuclear reactors to cool down with the help of the
sophisticated cooling system using fresh water.
But without this cooling system, the nuclear fission will continue.
Soon after the reactors were shut down, the emergency power generators turned on.
The lights were back, and the cooling system began doing its work to bring the temperature
down.
But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story.
Even though the emergency backup system worked, they could have never anticipated what would
come next.
A few minutes later, the shadow of a tsunami appeared on the horizon, and the 50-foot wave
towered over the sea wall.
Two of the employees attempting to make repairs in the basement drowned from the flood waters,
and the generators destroyed.
Everything went dark once again, and the reactors were no longer cooling the system.
The water surrounding the reactor was beginning to evaporate.
Believe it or not, TEPCO actually had a “Plan C” in a case like this.
There is a system called “Isolation condensers” that are supposed to keep the reactor cool,
even if the backup generators fail, and the entire facility loses electricity.
But after the flood, that stopped working, too.
The employees hoped that the isolation condensers were doing their job, but in reality, they
had no idea since they couldn't access it.
The meltdown was already beginning.
Just 15 minutes after the tsunami took place, TEPCO contacted the Japanese government to
let them know that an unusual event was occurring at the facility.
This disaster was beyond anything that the employees had ever been trained to deal with.
All of their backups upon backups had been destroyed like a line of dominoes.
They reached a point where they had no idea what to do next.
No one at TEPCO had been trained on what to do in case of the backup plans had failed
due to a flood.
Cars floated like they were toys in the bathtub, blocking doorways around the facility.
Hundreds of aftershock earthquakes that continued to happen throughout the rest of the day.
An engineer's job is to find solutions to seemingly impossible problems.
Desperate to find a solution, employees begin to pop the hoods of all of the cars in the
parking lot, and removed the batteries.
They spent the next 6 hours attempting to figure out a way to bring the generators back
on using the batteries.
By 9:19 p.m. they finally managed to collect enough car batteries to bring the cooling
system back online.
The only trouble was that so much time had passed, almost all of the freshwater had evaporated.
Without the water, the cooling system still would not work properly.
Now, you may be wondering- why not just use sea water?
After all, they just got pummeled with tons of it.
But the corporate executives in Tokyo strictly forbid the use of salt water, because it was
corrosive to the reactor.
It would mean losing a multi-million dollar facility, and never having the ability to
use it again.
They were hoping that the issue could be contained long enough for fresh water to arrive.
The superintendent of the second plant, Daini ordered 4,000 tons of water from the main
office in Tokyo to help cool the reactor, but they delivered 4,000 liters of drinking
water instead.
Meanwhile at the second facility, Daini, they were far enough away from the sea to still
have power in one of the buildings that had not been flooded.
They needed to lay down 5 miles long of cable to connect all of the reactors to the power
that they had available in order to keep the reactors cool again.
Normally, that amount of cable would take a month to lay, buy they needed it done in
a matter of hours.
Two hundred people were working on it, and some collapsed from exhaustion.
Three days after the tsunami, they successfully managed to finish running the cables and turning
the generators back on, and the cooling system began working again.
They were lucky enough to be near a freshwater stream, so they took old piping and pumped
cold water to the reactor.
The employees cheered.
Despite all of the odds, they had managed to avoid a nuclear disaster.
But first facility, Daiichi was not so lucky.
Their jerry-rigged generators made from car batteries just wouldn’t cut it, and they
were far from being out of the woods just yet.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo Prime Minister Naoto Kan received the news
that the Daici nuclear reactor was about to blow.
He had to consider the possibility of figuring out how to evacuate 50 million Japanese people
in a matter of hours.
The disaster had the potential to expose Fukushima all the way to Tokyo.
He said, "I feared that the entire nation of Japan would be paralyzed by chaos for quite
a long time."
The employees of TEPCO did not go home.
After all, their houses were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunamis.
With nothing left to go back to, they spent 24 hours inside of the dark facility, waiting
for that fresh water to arrive.
Everyone fully expected to die, but they passed the time trying to monitor the gauges of the
water levels in the dark.
They held flashlights and used pencils to recorded the maths to see how much time they
had left.
However, the gauge was not reading correctly.
They had no idea that all of the water was already evaporated from the cooling tanks
and that the metal was already beginning to melt.
It was already too late.
At this point, the reactor was a pressure cooker that was ready to blow.
The only way to prevent it from exploding was to release steam, which would help to
cool down the reactor.
But it would also mean exposing the surrounding areas to radiation.
Prime Minister Kan listened to their options, and agreed that releasing the steam was their
only choice.
He announced on Japanese television that the Daichi plant was in a state of emergency,
and everyone within a 2-mile or 3-kilometer radius of the Fukushima nuclear reactor must
evacuate.
Later, it would become obvious that 2 miles wasn’t nearly enough, and more and more
towns were told to evacuate.
On March 12, 2011, Prime Minister Kan was ready at sunrise after a sleepless night.
He got on a helicopter and flew to see the nuclear reactor himself.
He arrived at 7 a.m.
Employees maneuvered their way through the darkness to attempt to open up the valves
manually.
They were holding the geiger counters and realized that the levels of radiation were
much higher than they had ever anticipated.
Something had gone wrong.
The radiation was so high, they would not make it out alive.
They were forced to abort the mission until they could figure out an alternative solution.
Finally, at 2:15pm on March 12, steam was released.
At Daichi, the uranium from the rods were already melting the surrounding metal encasement.
This caused a chemical reaction that created flammable hydrogen gas.
The reactor became like a pressure cooker, and it began leaking through the top, before
finally exploding.
Everyone could feel the shock, and citizens from miles away could hear the explosion.
Now, radiation is pouring out of the reactor without any way to contain it.
Employees scrambled to fix the problem, but just when they thought the pressure had stabilized,
reactor number 3 exploded at 11:01 AM on March 14th.
Fifty TEPCO employees were standing very close to the explosion, but by some miracle, not
a single person was killed.
And only 11 people suffered from injuries.
By March 15th, it was 4 days after the tsunami.
None of the employees had a chance to go home or rest, because they were all still working
around the clock to prevent another explosion.
Over 150,000 residents living in Fukushima Prefecture had been ordered to evacuate, and
the radiation zone was now a 12-mile radius.
For the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to evacuate, they had nowhere
to go.
They were kept in the gymnasium of schools with very little food or water to go around.
No one was prepared to help these refugees, especially after so many other people losing
their homes after the earthquake and tsunami.
The staff disobeyed orders, and began using saltwater to cool down the reactor, but they
did not have an efficient way to pump it inside.
The superintendent quietly gave the order to get buses ready to evacuate the majority
of the TEPCO staff, just as reactor number four exploded as well.
By March 19th, a fire department equipped with ladders high enough to reach skyscrapers
finally arrived to help the employees.
They were able to spray water to refill the poos that cooled down the nuclear reactors.
Finally, they were safe, and the employees managed to contain the situation.
The Aftermath Eight months after the disaster, reporters
were finally allowed into the outer edges of Fukushima to witness the aftermath.
They were all forced to wear full-body suits and carry geiger counters with them.
Even after all this time it was still extremely dangerous to enter Fukushima, and it gets
much worse the closer you get to ground zero.
Even though this disaster was caused by natural events that were out of anyone's control,
the employees of TEPCO have been shunned by Japanese society, and they are still taking
all of the blame for what happened.
They humbly apologized to everyone, and took full responsibility for the event in a very
public way.
The employees who spent all of that time containing the accident now have lethal doses of radiation.
One person has already died of cancer.
And the rest will surely die years before their time.
It is estimated that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the nuclear waste from the
Fukushima disaster.
Robots equipped with video cameras enter the Daiichi and Daini plants in order to ensure
the health and safety of humans, but several of the robot missions have failed.
The problems with the cleanup are so complex, it will require inventing new technology that
does not even exist yet.
Forty years from now, most people who were alive to witness the disaster first-hand will
have likely passed away.
People who are not even born yet will be expected to be employed with the sole purpose of cleaning
up after the disaster.
This cleanup effort involves digging up the radioactive soil, dumping it into plastic
trash bags, and then moving the dirt to a remote location.
There are now over 9 million radioactive trash bags stacked in what looks like a black, shiny
mountain.
For years after the disaster, no one was allowed to return within a 12 mile radius of TEPCO’s
ground zero.
The levels of radiation were so high in certain areas that it would guarantee exposure to
deadly amounts of cancer-causing radiation.
Houses, cars, and classrooms were left abandoned with all of the objects still lying there
in a time capsule of the moment the disaster took place.
Plants are overgrown.
Hundreds of wild and aggressive radioactive boars now roam the streets.
The Japanese government has given subsidies to the residents who were forced to evacuate,
so that they could pay for new housing.
But for the people who spend multiple generations raising families in Fukushima, they say that
money is never enough.
It will never replace the beautiful countryside that they knew and loved.
Japanese citizens are understandably angry at TEPCO, and their employees.
Even though they prevented an even larger national disaster, there are many who feel
that a nuclear power plant should have never been there in the first place.
Some people cannot seem to believe that this could have been caused by a natural disaster,
and the disaster has inspired several different conspiracy theories.
Eight years after the disaster occurred, people are slowly beginning to move back to Fukushima.
The town of Naraha, which is 12 miles from the disaster, was the first to reopen, but
less than half of the residents have chosen to move back.
Over the course of 4 years, the city spent $180 million trying to bring the town back
to living conditions.
All of the old buildings had to be torn down and replaced with new ones.
At the brand new school, there are only 68 children studying there, and the kitchen staff
has to check the radioactivity in every single ingredient of the locally grown food.
While these citizens are doing the best they can to get back to normal life, only time
will tell if their health will be negatively affected by living in Fukushima.
There are many citizens who are not content to wait around while the government cleans
up.
One Naraha resident named Hisao Yanai purchased his own digger so that he could aid in the
effort of digging radioactive dirt.
During an interview with National Geographic, he said that he doesn’t mind getting cancer
if it means bringing his hometown back to life for future generations.
In Japanese culture, there is a deep sense of community, and the idea of sacrificing
one’s self for the “greater good”.
And in Japanese Shinto tradition, there is the idea that everything has a soul, including
plants and animals.
So, for many people who have decided to return at their own risk, it is because they want
to sacrifice their own lives to clean up Fukushima.
Some are choosing to take care of the livestock and household pets that were abandoned after
the evacuation.
These few people have become caretakers of the radioactive wasteland.
How This Disaster Affects The World Unfortunately, this disaster is not isolated
to just Japan.
Fukushima was given a score of 7 on the International Nuclear Disaster Event Scale, which is the
highest possible ranking.
According to Stanford University, the steam from the Daiichi reactor released “radionuclides”
onto the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
In just four days, a strong jetstream brought this radioactive water all the way to the
shores of North America.
Studies found that the fish in Japan’s water contained a radioactive substance called Caesium-137
in amounts that were 150 times the legal limit of consumption, and that the water itself
in a 150,000 square kilometer area around Japan contains 1,000 times more radiation
than it ever has before.
The Japanese government is continuing their efforts to clean the oceans as well as the
land.
Even though it is clear that the cleanup is far from over, there are those who are eager
to move forward.
In 2020, the Olympics are coming to Tokyo, Japan, and the country is already making efforts
to welcome foreigners so that they are not afraid of the radiation.
It was announced that their torch relay will begin in Fukushima.
Many people consider the fact that the government is encouraging citizens to move back to Fukushima
is premature, even if it is only in the towns on the outer edges.
Even so, the progress is incredibly slow, and while towns like Naraha have been aggressively
trying to return to normalcy, the vast majority of the 12-mile disaster zone of will remain
a post-apocalyptic realm.
Now, years after the disaster, we have to ask ourselves if nuclear energy is truly worth
having.
In recent years, there has been a push to decommission nuclear power plants around the
world.
Some say that it is a “green” energy, because nuclear energy is reusable, and can
last forever.
But is that one benefit truly worth the risk, if something goes wrong?
In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, the employees did everything within their
power to stop the crisis, but they were no match to mother nature’s wrath.
Who is to say that we won’t encounter another hurricane, flood, or tornado that won’t
dismantle yet another nuclear reactor on the same level as Fukushima?
Next time, will we be ready?