Five years after nuclear meltdown, no one knows what to do with Fukushima
Seen from the road below, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station looks much as it may have right after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that caused a triple meltdown here almost five years ago.
The number three reactor building, which exploded in a hydrogen fireball during the disaster, remains a tangle of broken concrete and twisted metal. A smashed crane sits exactly where it was on March 11, 2011. To the side of the reactor units, a building that once housed boilers stands open to the shore, its rusted, warped tanks exposed.
The scene is a testament to the chaos that was unleashed when the tsunami engulfed these buildings, triggering the world’s worst nuclear disaster since the one in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986. Almost 16,000 people were killed along Japan’s northeastern coast in the tsunami, and 160,000 more lost their homes and livelihoods.
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Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the utility company that runs the site and drew fierce criticism for its handling of the disaster, says the situation has improved greatly.
“In the last five years, radiation levels have been reduced substantially, and we can say that the plant is stable now,” said Akira Ono, the Tepco plant superintendent.
Efforts to contain the contamination have progressed, according to Tepco, including the completion on Tuesday of a subterranean ice wall around the plant that will freeze the ground and stop leakage. Moves to decommission the plant – a process that could take 30 or 40 years, Ono estimated – are getting underway.
People will be allowed to return to their homes in the nearby town of Naraha next month, and to Tomioka, even closer to the plant, next year. For now, Tomioka and neighbouring Okuma are ghost towns, lined with shops, fast-food restaurants and gambling parlours that haven’t had a customer in five years. Bicycles lean near front doors and flower pots sit empty on window sills.