SUMMARY: Five years ago, an epic tsunami off the coast of Japan triggered a triple-reactor nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Ever since then, 7,000 workers have been laboring round-the-clock on a massive, and unprecedented, cleanup effort. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien takes an exclusive look at ground zero of the greatest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):Fukushima Daiichi was one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. Today, it is a busy, crowded, dangerous deconstruction site.
My invitation to see it up close was unique.
What next? Does three have a lot to…
But even with special permission, getting inside is not easy by design. Radioactive contamination levels have gone down, but not nearly enough to dispense with the Tyvek suits, three layers of socks and gloves and full face respirators.
It’s like being an astronaut on a space walk. Here, 7,000 workers are doing a job for which there is no playbook.
NAOHIRO MASUDA, TEPCO (through interpreter): What makes this so difficult is the lack of experience. Nobody in the world has done this before.
MILES O’BRIEN: Naohiro Masuda is the chief decommissioning officer for the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO.
NAOHIRO MASUDA (through interpreter):We still need to decide what we’re even going to do. For that, we need to rely on the knowledge of people all around the world.
MILES O’BRIEN: He relies heavily on this man.
LAKE BARRETT, TEPCO Advisor:For them to come out and to publicly say “We need help” is different for them.
MILES O’BRIEN: Lake Barrett is one of a very select group who has some experience with a job like this. He was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission manager in charge of the decommissioning of Three Mile Island Unit 2 near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It melted down in 1979.
LAKE BARRETT (adviser): Fukushima is much more complex. The damage is much greater. There’s three melted cores. But the fundamentals of how you address this and how you recover are similar.
MILES O’BRIEN: The daily details of this 40-year job are managed here in a radiation-shielded, earthquake-proof emergency operations center.
The superintendent is another TEPCO veteran, Akira Ono, on duty here since June of 2013.
AKIRA ONO, TEPCO (through interpreter): Ever since the disaster, we have been working here 24 hours a day 365 days a year. We’re ready to respond to anything that happens.
Fukushima hopes to host some of the events for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo to show the world that the worst days of the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster are behind it.
"We need to set a goal so that we can show how much Fukushima has recovered," Masao Uchibori, who was elected the new governor of Fukushima Prefecture in October, said Tuesday.
"The Olympics is meant to show to the world the Tohoku region's reconstruction. We want to cooperate as much as possible," he said, as cited by Reuters.
Uchibori made no mention of which events Fukushima Prefecture would aim to host, but football is the likely choice, on account of the schedule and large number of stadia needed for the Olympic tournament.
In September 2013, Tokyo successfully won the bid to host the 125th International Olympic Committee (IOC) session, beating out Madrid and Istanbul. Japan last hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964 – the first Olympics ever held in Asia. Tokyo was actually supposed to host the 1940 Summer Olympics, although Japan’s invasion of China saw the games moved to Helsinki before ultimately being canceled because of World War II.
Tokyo said the event would help the country recover from the 2011 tsunami and earthquake which sparked the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
“Japan needs hope and dreams,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said after the IOC announcement.
Just days before Tokyo won the bid, Abe told the IOC that ongoing leaks of radioactive water at Fukushima would have no impact on the country’s ability to host the 2020 Olympics.
“There have been some expressions of concern over the leak of polluted water at Fukushima, but the government will take a lead in achieving a complete resolution of this problem,” Abe told reporters at the time. “I will explain carefully that we are doing our utmost with a firm resolve and that in 2020, seven years from now, there will be absolutely no problem.”
The president of the Japanese Olympic Committee further attempted to assuage fears by saying the radiation level in Tokyo was “the same” as in other major global capitals such as London, New York and Paris.
But Mitsuhei Murata, a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, said it was “immoral” to invite people to the Olympic Games in Japan, saying “the health environment cannot be secured,” the UK Independent cited him as saying at the time.
He called for the bid to be rescinded.
Later that month, Abe ordered that two Fukushima reactors which survived the 2011 disaster be permanently decommissioned.
The president of Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operated the disabled Fukushima plant, promised Abe it would finish treating contaminated water at Fukushima by March 2015.
Earlier this month, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said the radioactive water that has accumulated at the plant must be decontaminated and dumped into the ocean.
Fukushima water to be cleaned, dumped into Pacific, watchdog says
Some 400 tons of untainted groundwater are believed to be seeping into the buildings of the Fukushima plant on a daily basis. It is then mixing with the toxic water generated in the process of cooling the crippled reactors. TEPCO collects the radioactive groundwater and stores it at the site of the plant. However, storing the groundwater becomes more difficult each day, as the water quantity continues to increase.
The March 11, 2011, incident at Fukushima was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Despite TEPCO’s intensive cleanup operation at the site, it will likely take four decades to completely decommission the plant’s four damaged reactors.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): It’s been three years since a tsunami destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan, and forced the government to shut down the plants that remained. Today, regulators announced they would speed up safety checks on a pair of idle reactors in southwest Japan, a key step in the prime minister’s push to restart them and others.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at the debate raging in the country about that idea.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): In Japan, a meticulous and massive cleanup is under way near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
They are scraping off two inches of soil contaminated with cesium and other radionuclides expelled from the plant after a series of explosions triggered by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. The contaminated soil is bagged, placed on a watertight pad, and then covered with a tarp. It will be stored like this until a permanent site can be found.
The radioactive cesium will remain in the soil for 300 years. At Yutaka and Keiko Hakozaki home in Naraha, the cleanup apparently worked. We took some Geiger counter readings in their yard. Cesium levels were 0.204 microsieverts per hour, just under the government limit of 0.23.
Still, the Hakozakis are unsure about returning to their home, but their feelings about nuclear power are now etched in stone.
“We experienced this accident firsthand, which is all the more reason we think that nuclear power plants are not suitable for this country,” he said.
Right now in Japan, not a single nuclear power plant is online generating electricity, 48 nuclear reactors, able to generate 30 percent of Japan’s electrical demand, idle while this country decides if the Hakozakis are right or if turning the nukes back on is prudent, perhaps even mandatory, to maintain Japan’s highly electrified lifestyle.
Japan is making up for the idle nuclear facilities by running their fossil fuel plants at full-tilt, importing $266 billion worth of oil, gas and coal last year. In the country where the Kyoto protocols were drafted, CO2 emissions are up 13 percent.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing an energy policy that would turn the nuclear plants back on as soon as they meet more stringent safety standards adopted after the Fukushima meltdowns. While he has the votes in parliament to make that happen, he doesn’t have much support on the street. In fact, polls show as much as 80 percent of voters here now oppose nuclear power.
And large, noisy protests like this outside Abe’s office are a regular occurrence.
MILES O’BRIEN (Newshour): As brisk winter mornings go, this was a fine one to go fishing. We steamed out of the port of Kashima, Japan, on the good ship Inari Maru. Our captain was Kimio Sato, a fourth-generation fisherman. His son, Kosi, was at the helm.
Their predecessors in the family business never went on an expedition like this one.
“We cannot eat the fish we catch,” he told me. “All fish must be released. We are allowed to fish only the amount necessary for inspection.”
The Inari Maru was plying troubled waters, fishing for data. It’s part of a long-term effort to figure out when, if ever, fish caught near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will be safe to eat.
Really reeled in nets filled with flounder, but threw most of them back into the Pacific. In the end, their haul was just one small bucket, about 12 pounds of fish, headed to a lab to be tested for radionuclide.
In Japan, the radiation safety standard for fish is 100 Becquerels per kilogram, the most stringent in the world.
“We occasionally catch fish exceeding that safety standard,” says Kimio. “I don’t think there are many, though, but because we’re in the 20-kilometer zone, I think we should be cautious.”
KEN BUESSELER, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: The Fukushima reactor in the background.
MILES O’BRIEN: Scientists who have studied these waters wouldn’t disagree. Ken Buesseler is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He was part of the team 12 weeks after the meltdowns on a research expedition financed by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, also a NewsHour funder.
Buesseler cut his scientific teeth studying the impact of the Chernobyl meltdown on the Black Sea.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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