Fukushima at 15
Michael J Keegan
Today marks the 15th anniversary of the world's largest industrial accident - the triple meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear station.
Governments around Canada today parrot the phrase that nuclear is safe. But Fukushima lays bare those lies.
To honor all those that are still living the radioactive nightmare, please read this detailed article, published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, about life in and around Fukushima today. Below I've grabbed content that seems most alarming to me.
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Fukushima at 15
Living with radioactive hot spots and stigma as Japan's government pushes for more reactors
https://thebulletin.org/2026/03/fukushima-at-15-living-with-radioactive-hot-spots-and-stigma/
The wave that washed over Japan’s eastern shore killed 20,000 people, many of whose bodies were washed out to sea and never recovered. As radiation levels spiked around the destroyed reactors, 160,000 people were evacuated from Okuma and 11 other towns. A 20-kilometer ring around the plant, an area twice the size of New York City, was declared a nuclear exclusion zone. Hit by a freak snowstorm that covered the town with cesium 137 and other radionuclides, even Iitate, a village 60 kilometers to the northwest, was evacuated.
Fifteen years later, 4,000 workers struggle to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors remain so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. No one knows exactly where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals, possibly into the ground. The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than 1,000 tanks that reached capacity in 2023. This cooling water, which Tepco initially claimed was clean and has been releasing into the Pacific Ocean since 2023, was found to be contaminated with 62 radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Two fuel pools packed with spent nuclear fuel have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to fall over and spill into the ocean.
The radioactive material blown out of the destroyed reactors made Fukushima’s forests, which cover three-quarters of the nuclear exclusion zone, unsafe to enter. The wild boars that used to be hunted here, as well as the plants and mushrooms that used to be foraged for food, are too radioactive to eat.
About 100,000 workers in protective suits and masks swarmed over Fukushima’s farms and fields, scraping up five centimeters of soil and piling it into great pyramids of black plastic garbage bags. Soil containing less than 8,000 becquerels per kilo of radioactivity, which the Ministry of the Environment calls “Happy Soil,” is readied for shipment across the country, to be used in landfills and construction.
The disaster at Chernobyl (as it was then spelled) could be dismissed as the product of human error and inferior Soviet technology. Fukushima was different. The world’s worst industrial accident took place in an advanced industrial country with 54 nuclear reactors, supplying a third of Japan’s electricity. The final bill for containing the destroyed reactors, storing the waste, and rebuilding parts of the nuclear exclusion zone could cost over $1 trillion. This is one quarter of Japan’s annual economy. Yet, the government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
Tepco plans to dump 22 trillion becquerels of tritium per year into the Pacific Ocean over the next 20 to 30 years. This is less than the tritium released from Canada’s nuclear reactors, which dump more than 3,000 trillion becquerels per year into the Saint Lawrence River.
There are many lawsuits against Tepco and the gov't for thyroid cancers. The government is fighting them, claiming overdiagnosis and a lack of proof that Fukushima Daiichi is the radiogenic cause of cancer. Threats are directed against people from Fukushima, particularly women with cancer, who are considered personally dangerous and politically injurious to the reputation of Japan. Thyroid cancer used to be rare in Fukushima Prefecture, with one case in a million. After five rounds of screening, the incidence rate is now 400 cases out of 380,000 people—1,000 times higher than before the disaster.
“The trees are too contaminated to use in my wood-burning stove,” he says. “I also failed at growing shiitake mushrooms without elevated levels of cesium. The old people are dying. We see lots of ambulances on the road, and the young people have not come back. This is our most serious problem. I thought we could revive Fukushima, but now I believe the area is likely to return to the mountains out of which it came.”
Also from Mike Borie:
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Angela Bischoff
Ontario Clean Air Alliance
CleanAirAlliance.org
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This list is a private list for sharing information about the push - and the push back - on so-called small modular reactors in Canada. There's also a "starter" web site at http://stop-smrs.weebly.com/ and a Facebook page
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