Erstellt am: 9. 3. 2012 - 10:47 Uhr

The Fukushima Hangover

A year on from the disaster, Japanese people don’t want nuclear power but are unsure how to replace it.

16,000 people were killed by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on the 11th March, 2011. Most fell victim to the 12 metre high tsunami wave - a fast moving wall of water that crushed everything in its path, leveling vast swathes of the Japanese coast. Such was the deadly destruction caused by this force of nature that it seemed to me during those days almost impious that many of the world`s media were more concerned with the news that officials at the Tokyo Electric Power Company had announced that a "first level emergency" was developing at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Californians were asking for iodine pills as the Japanese buried their dead in mass graves.

Yet a year on, as optimism returns to the shores of north-eastern Japan, the legacy of the Fukushima disaster continues to cause worry. This is partly a testament to the amazing resilience of the Japanese people to withstand and recover from natural disasters, and partly a testament to the slow, persistent creep of radiation worries. The leaks will haunt us for generations.

TEPCO

The scars of the tsunami, meanwhile, are beginning to fade. When, a year ago, the water receded, what was left was an apocalyptic landscape of destroyed houses, upturned cars, boats stranded kilometres inland, not to mention the thousands of bloated corpses. On a recent visit, the BBC`s Gerry Northam, described how this land had been "stripped flat and [was] ready for redevelopment" with the detritus of the catastrophe neatly piled up for recycling - plastics and metals separated in neatly stacked mile long piles. The dead, hastily buried for health reasons, had been dug up and cremated according to Buddhist tradition.

Communities had worked together and rebuilt homes and lives. It was a time of altruism and heroism. Japan, a nation of copers, had coped. This doesn’t make the loss of life any less painful but journalists who have visited the worst-hit seaside communities report a sense of closure a year on from the disaster.

But there is no closure to the nuclear crisis, which despite early attempts by the authorities to play down the dangers, was eventually graded as a "level 7" radiation leak, the highest on the scale. This made it officially the worse nuclear disaster since the Soviet reactor in Chernobyl, in present-day Ukraine, blew up 25 years earlier. The scope of the two events isn’t quite comparable. According to the most reliable estimates, Chernobyl released ten times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere, including greater concentrations of more long-lasting pollutants . But a tenth of the Chernobyl fallout is still frightening enough. The official classification states that Fukushima was "a major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."

One of these countermeasures, the 20km exclusion zone, was established soon after the quake and is still in place today. It has meant forced exile and loss of livelihoods for 80,000 people in a country where people have close emotional bonds with their local soil. They will not be allowed to return in the foreseeable future. Fm4 correspondent Tony Cheng went to the Fukushima region to monitor the situation one year on. He says that apart from the buses which were ferrying radiation-suit clad workers to and from the plant, the area around the perimeter of the zone seem eerily silent and "very deserted". But then he was surprised to see tourists taking snap-shots near warning signs. In just 12 months a tragedy can become a curiosity.

The workers, organized in tightly controlled revolving shifts to minimize their radiation exposure, have made some progress on decommissioning the stricken nuclear plant. In December nuclear workers brought the plant into a state of "cold shutdown" which means the water that cools nuclear fuel rods has been brought permanently below boiling point. But the nuclear authorities admit that it could take 40 years to dismantle to complex completely at unimaginable cost.

EPA

However it seems the exclusion zone may be insufficient to protect to health of people in the region. Tony Cheng was travelling with a Geiger counter to measure the radiation exposure. Contrary to his expectations, he says the levels on the perimeter of the zone were "really quite low" but when, later in the day, he travelled away from the plant to the west of Fukushima prefecture the readings "started going crazy". At times the readings were 100 times the natural background radiation levels.

The radiation leak from Fukushima came in the form of gases. Mostly these gas clouds contained iodine which has a very short life, but they also contained cesium, which is highly radioactive and has a half-life of 30 years. A leaked report in June admitted that as much as 50mg of plutonium had been released into the atmosphere in the first 100 hours after the quake. Plutonium has a half life of up to 25,000 years. Particularly between the 12th and 14th of March 2011, the wind blew these dangerous isotopes to the west and south. Then snowfall brought the isotopes down to earth and over the months many have seeped into the earth in unexpected places leaving "hotspots" of dangerous radiation levels. Cheng met a researcher who had tracked these hotspots around the prefecture and had found one where levels were 400 times background radiation. A family was living in a house close by.

The sense of unease is palpable in Fukushima city, some 60km from the plant. According to the government the levels of radiation there are acceptable. But the authorities have issued reassurances before, only to change the story later and so, like the boy who cried wolf, they are no longer trusted on nuclear safety issues by many Japanese. Cheng met a group of mothers who were moving away from the city because they were convinced that their children`s health would be endangered. Some locals have even moved to the cold northern island Hokkaido in search of an untarnished atmosphere.

The health impact will only become apparent in the decades to come. Professor Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist from Princeton University has estimated that 1,000 people might eventually die from cancer because of exposure to radiation leaked from Fukushima (and here it is worth remembering that the tsunami toll was 16,000). But such estimates will probably remain controversial, partly due to the difficulties of pinning down links to instances of cancer and other illnesses or disorders. The arguments about the radiation toll from Chernobyl continues to rage quarter of a century after the event. A peer-reviewed body - the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation - concluded that 9,000 people will probably eventually die as result of the radiation leaks. That has become the standard text. But many anti-nuclear groups reject those findings, suspecting an industry cover-up, and prefer the research of Alexey V. Yablokov who estimates that close to a million have died. It is a question of who you trust and why.

Tony Cheng says researchers in Japan are already worried. He spoke to a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack who has studied radiation effects his entire life: "He was in no doubt that the kind of sickness he had been seeing in Fukushima, particularly among children, are associated with radiation." Many people in Japan are worried that the government is playing down the impact, not least because of the implications for compensation payments.

EPA/DENNIS M. SABANGAN

So what lessons have been learned from the nuclear disaster? The government has shut down all but a handful of the dozens of reactors pending the results of safety tests. Many Japanese hope they will never be restarted. Cheng says the disaster "crystalized" an opposition to nuclear energy that had existed for years. When he was in Tokyo, protesters marched through the streets urging the government to turn their back on nuclear before another disaster strikes. An anti-nuclear group announced last month that it had collected 5 million signatures on a citizens petition to have Japan’s remaining reactors shut down permanently.

Yet the temporary shutdown on the majority of Japan’s plants has laid bare a bitter truth for Japan. The brightly-lit country of electronic exuberance is painfully energy insecure. With its reactors out of action, Japan has relied on expensive energy imports that have crippled its already troubled economy. Japan posted a record trade deficit in January, which economists attributed largely to a record increase in imports of liquefied natural gas to make up for the shortfall in energy traditionally garnered from nuclear power. Anti-nuclear campaigners say it is time for a transition to renewables, but it will take years until wind, solar or tidal power plants are efficient enough to fill the energy gap. In the eyes of many Japanese, the government backed the wrong horse. For decades campaigners said it was folly to trust nuclear in one of the most seismically active regions on Earth, but for decades the government invested massively in nuclear at the cost of all other technology.

The Japanese government is stuck between a rock and a hard place -the voting public fears nuclear power but also fears a unemployment and economic stagnation. Large scale energy imports are not economically viable in the long term. But as life gets back to normal in much of Japan, the government can't sweep the problems of Fukushima province under the table. Families in Koriyama, west of the plant, have to use bottled water even for cooking and children can't play in the dirt for fear of contamination. Children, in other words, can't act like children. Levels of radiation ten times the background levels are being recorded inside school grounds. Lives have been put on hold.

Japan finds itself at a cross-roads - as it looks for an affordable but safe energy supply, it will need all of its famous resilience, organization and innovation.

Reality Check: "The Fukushima Hangover"