#The Fukushima Legacy
As of 2021, not only has the Fukushima crisis, now in its eleventh year, yet to be resolved — the initial 2011 declaration of a national emergency has not been rescinded — but a second major crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, has followed in its wake. For neither Fukushima nor COVID-19 is there a resolution in sight.
The people of Fukushima — and indeed of Japan as a whole — continue to suffer from the impact of the 2011 meltdown of three reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The disaster released a radioactive slurry into the soil, air, and sea, including caesium-137 and strontium-90 — the equivalent, as nuclear physicist Koide Hiroaki reports, of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Within the reactors, a significant volume, estimated to be more than 1,100 tons, of nuclear fuel, debris, and waste remains.
The caesium slowly degenerates but, according to Koide, even the passage of a hundred years will only diminish it by one-tenth, leaving Japan in a state of nuclear emergency far into the future. Many thousands of Japanese citizens remain displaced by the disaster. In April 2011, 2,700 tons of “less radioactive” water was released into the sea, but much more has accumulated since then, having absorbed some measure of radioactivity from being poured in to cool the melted reactor cores.
The buildup of polluted water continued at a rate, as of early 2020, of several hundred tons each day, with a total volume now in excess of one million tons. Nobody knows what the effect will be of pouring substantial quantities of irradiated fluids into the ocean over the next decade, even if they have been partially “cleaned.” But that is the government’s plan. The water dump, however, is to be held over until after the Tokyo Olympics.
Japan has so far escaped international censure for such high-risk plans. One may readily imagine what the response would be from the international community if some other country — North Korea, for example — were to announce such a step.
With the 2011 nuclear crisis and state of emergency still in effect, a second and very different crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, followed from early 2020. Over one hundred million people around the world have so far contracted it and two million have died. Japan accounts for approximately four hundred thousand and seven thousand of those figures, respectively.
In its current iteration, the COVID-19 emergency declaration covers Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures and extends from January to March 2021. The Abe government postponed the Tokyo Games from 2020 until the following year in response to the pandemic.
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