Fukushima Recovery Plagued with Setbacks – 2 Articles; Book Review: Return to Fukushima
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Fukushima Recovery Plagued with Setbacks
John Laforge
Fukushima workers flee site after tsunami scare
Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone areas in the world, and the regular quakes raise traumatic memories of the March 11, 2011, record-breaker that left 19,000 dead and smashed the six-reactor Fukushima-Daiichi site. A magnitude 5.5 quake struck just off Japan’s southeast Tokara coast on July 3; a mag. 4.2 quake hit east of Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture July 12; and a mag. 4.1 quake shook the same area July 25.
In late July, a mighty 8.8-magnitude quake struck Avacha Bay in Russia’s Far East, triggering tsunami warnings and evacuations across the entire Pacific Rim. The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was one of the strongest ever recorded.
The owner/operator of the wrecked reactor complex, Tokyo Electric Power Co., evacuated its entire staff of 4,000 in response to warnings of a possible nine-foot tsunami, after first halting its pumping of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific.
Elsewhere in Japan, over 1.9 million people were urged to evacuate the eastern seaboard, and a 4-foot tsunami wave did strike north of Fukushima at Iwate Prefecture, some 1,090 miles from Avacha Bay, site of the major Russian earthquake.
China partially lifts ban on Japanese seafood imports
China “conditionally resumed” the importation of Japanese seafood products June 30 ⸺ except the 10 prefectures closest to the Fukushima disaster site ⸺ after conducting water sample inspections off the coast of the site. Beijing had banned all such imports from Japan as a protest and precaution, following the 2023 start of deliberately discharging large volumes of radioactively contaminated cooling water into the Pacific Ocean. The 2023 ban was imposed to “comprehensively prevent the food safety risks of radioactive contamination caused by the discharge of nuclear wastewater from Fukushima into the sea,” China’s General Administration of Customs said then. Shocked by Japan’s action, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry added that the discharge was an “extremely selfish and irresponsible act,” which would “push the risks onto the whole world (and) pass on the pain to future generations of human beings,” the Agence France-Presse reported.
Chinese customs officials said June 30 the seafood import ban would continue for ten prefectures, namely Fukushima and its nine closest neighboring states. Products from other regions will need health certificates, radioactive substance detection qualification certificates, and production area certificates issued by the Japanese government for Chinese customs declarations, the government said.
Relatedly, Hong Kong announced that it will maintain its ban on Japanese seafood, sea salt, and seaweed imports from the same ten prefectures still targeted by mainland China – Fukushima, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, Saitama, Tokyo, and Chiba – citing ongoing concerns about the risks associated with the discharge of radioactive wastewater.
Tepco lost $6 billion as meltdown recovery falters
Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings corporation (Tepco) lost $5.8 billion (903 billion yen) between April and June this year as the owner and operator of the triple reactor meltdown at Fukushima, overrun with the costs of inventing, designing, building, and testing robotic machines with which to remotely extract the ferociously radioactive melted reactor fuel from deep inside the earth-quake and tsunami-wrecked reactors. There are a total of over 880 metric tonnes of “corium” or melted and rubblized uranium and plutonium fuel in three reactors that Tepco claims it will extract. Nikkei-Asia reported August 1st that Tepco says it has $4.7 billion “earmarked for future demolition work” (700 billion yen), which doesn’t even cover this spring’s one-quarter loss. Tepco has said that its preparations for the extraction are “expected to take 12 to 15 years.”
The quarterly financial loss makes a mockery of announced plans by the government and TEPCO to fully complete decommissioning of the rubbished reactors by 2051.
Two out of 14-to-20-million tonnes of radioactive soil buried on PM’s office grounds, in “safety” parody
In a surreal display of political slapstick on July 19th, the office of Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba buried on his office’s garden grounds two cubic meters of radioactive soil scraped up during Fukushima clean-up operations (in which some 14-to-20 million cubic meters of topsoil and debris were collected) ⎯ “to show it is safe to reuse.”
Nippon Television reported that “The radioactive cesium concentration in the soil being buried is 6,400 Becquerels per kilogram” (Bq/kg). “Becquerels” are a standard measuring unit of radioactivity. The 6,400 is below the legally permitted limit of 8,000 Bq/Kg.
The radiation emitted by the soil originates from cesium-137, which was released in large amounts by Fukushima’s melting and exploding reactors and subsequently fell to the ground as fallout. Cesium fallout continues to contaminate vast areas of forest and farmland in the region.
The millions of tons of collected soil now in storage are being tested and sorted to identify material with cesium at 8,000 Bq/Kg or less. Several million tons of it may then be used as fill in construction projects, road-building, and railway embankments all around Japan. Asphalt, farm soil, “or layers of other materials should be used to seal in the radioactivity,” Akira Asakawa, an Environment Ministry official with the soil project, told the Agence France-Presse.
The PM’s demonstration plot is the first “reuse” of the poisoned waste, while experiments elsewhere have been halted due to public protest. The PM’s contaminated dirt was covered up with about eight inches of normal soil to provide some radiation shielding.
Any radiation exposure is unsafe, but adverse effects like radiation sickness, immune disorders, or cancers caused by contact with the radioactive soil would take years or decades to appear, owing to the latency period between radiation exposure and the onset of induced health problems. The joke seems to be that since Prime Minister Ishiba hasn’t dropped dead after walking by, low-dose exposure must be harmless.
Readers may remember a very similar high-level comedy sketch performed by former President Barack Obama, who traveled to Flint, Michigan in May 2016. Drinking water supplies there had been contaminated with lead and to calm the public uproar, Obama sat before the cameras and theatrically downed a glass of water. The straight-faced routine was proof positive and rock-solid confirmation beyond a doubt that Flint’s tap water was safe to drink. Bottom’s up!
Fukushima disaster response to last eons
Countless dilemmas and setbacks have plagued the now 14-year-long emergency response to the triple reactor meltdown and widespread radiation releases that began on March 11, 2011, at Fukushima on Japan’s northeast coast.
Perhaps the most significant stumbling block, acknowledged by Tepco on July 29, is the “unprecedented” technical complexity of locating, contacting, removing, and containerizing 880 tonnes of highly radioactive melted reactor fuel still smoldering at the bottom of the three devastated reactors.
Unprecedented is the key word here, since the industry has never before had to contain such a large mass of wasted and unapproachable radioactivity. All the work of dealing with the wasted fuel must be done robotically and remotely, since the waste’s fierce radioactivity kills living things that come near. Just planning and preparing to remove the “corium” material will take at least another 12 years.
Toyoshi Fuketa, head of a regulatory body overseeing the site, said at a press conference earlier that “The difficulty of retrieving the first handful of debris has become apparent,” the Kyodo News agency reported.
In 14 years’ time, engineers managed to design, build, test, and rebuild a one-of-a-kind robot that removed less than one-gram of the waste fuel from reactor No. 2 last year. That November “breakthrough” was three years behind schedule, “and some experts estimate that the decommissioning work could take more than a century,” CBS News and Mainichi Japan reported.
The torturously slow process has made Tepco’s early prediction of complete cleanup by 2051 (40 years’ time) appear to have been made up for PR reasons.
Tepco said July 29 that it would need another 12 to 15 years’ worth of preparation ⎯ until 2040 ⎯ “before starting the full-scale removal of melted fuel” at the No. 3 reactor. Tepco earlier claimed that “full-scale” extraction would begin four years ago, in 2021 according to the daily Asahi Shimbun August 1g.
Of an estimated 880 tons of debris, only 0.9 grams have been recovered to date. With one million grams in a tonne, Tepco has only 879 million-plus grams to go, and “A simple calculation based on the time since the accident suggests the removal process could take another 13.6 billion years to complete,” the Asahi Shimbun smirked.
China’s reactor report card omits embarrassing emission info
China issues annual reports on its extensive nuclear power operations known as “China Nuclear Energy.” The 2024 edition, its latest, made headlines by omitting for the first time information on the routine radioactive gases and liquids released from its operating reactors.
Kyodo News reported that the omission may be a way to avoid accusations of hypocrisy, as China has strenuously condemned Japan’s discharge of radioactively contaminated wastewater into the Pacific. At the same time China’s domestic reactors in 2022 reportedly “released wastewater containing tritium at levels up to nine times higher than the annual discharge limit” set by Japan’s discharge authorities. ###
[John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]
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Fukushima Radioactive Waste Problems Metastasize
John Laforge
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tepco, has said that two specially designed and newly installed robots will need three years to remove 3,000 sandbags from the basements of the three destroyed nuclear reactor buildings at Fukushima-Daiichi, in Japan.
The sandbags were used in the initial, panic-driven days of the site’s triple reactor meltdowns of March 2011, when highly radioactive water gushed into the reactor basements and had to be diverted. Interesting Engineering reported that the sandbags are in areas “with lethal radiation levels” too hazardous for manual work.
The robots will be operated remotely due to the sandbags’ fierce radioactivity, because of the large bulk of the bags which weigh a total of 41 metric tonnes, and because of the chaotic wreckage inside the destroyed reactors’ basements.
The project is expected to take at least until March 2028, according to Tepco.
News reports did not specify the kind of radioactivity that contaminates the deadly sandbags, but the melted reactor No. 3 was using fuel made partially of plutonium, the most toxic material known to science, which is radioactively hazardous for 240,000 years. Deadly isotopes in addition to plutonium inside the high radiation zones too hot for humans include strontium-90, cesium-137 and -134, iodine-131, cobalt-60, carbon-14, tritium, technetium, neptunium, americium, and others.
Tepco says the deadly sandbags will be “sealed in dedicated containers” and moved to “temporary storage.” The company’s plan for long-term containment of this radioactive waste was not outlined and Tepco was not compelled by the press or the government to explain its long-term strategy.
In Tokyo, the Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC) reports that the sandbags have deteriorated, and cannot be recovered with the bags intact, forcing engineers to consider pumping them out together with the basement’s stagnant water, and then enclosing it all in containers.
Waste storage systems at risk from quakes
Until at least 2027, the sandbags, in addition to tons of highly radioactive sludge produced by filtering contaminated cooling water, have to be kept in an area still at risk of flooding from potential earthquakes and tsunamis, the CNIC reported.
A March 2025 report by Japan’s Cabinet Office’s Disaster Management Working Group said that a long-predicted “mega-quake” ⸺ if it occurs, as anticipated, along the Nankai Trough off Japan’s southwest Pacific coast ⸺ would likely trigger huge tsunamis, destroy thousands of buildings, spawn mass fires, cost Japan $1.81 trillion, and potentially kill 300,000 people. Under the government report’s worst-case scenario, a magnitude-9 earthquake could see 1.23 million evacuees fleeing the area, or about 10% of its population.
The Nankai trough is where the Philippine Sea Plate is subducting under the Eurasian Plate and accumulating tectonic pressure that can snap. The magnitude 9 undersea tectonic eruption of March 11, 2011 — Japan’s worst ever recorded earthquake whose power smashed reactor foundations at Fukushima Daiichi and flooded the site with tsunami waves — moved the island of Honshu, Japan’s largest, eastward an astounding eight feet.
Japan is one of the earth’s most earthquake-prone areas, and because of Fukushima’s daily accumulation of contaminated cooling water, some 1.3 million tonnes of this highly radioactive liquid waste is held in 1,000 giant 1,000-tonne tanks near the coast. So, the sludge containers, the sandbags, and the wastewater tanks are all vulnerable to daily tremors and the dreaded mega-quake, which can potentially send much of this radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean.
“Dirty, dangerous, and bank-busting” is so negative. Let’s call nuclear power “Clean, safe, too cheap to meter.”
[John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]
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“Return to Fukushima”
Cindy Folkers
Book Review
Thomas A. Bass’s Return to Fukushima is a poignant blend of investigative journalism, environmental critique, and personal reflection that revisits the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster. Bass brings poetic prose, incisive analysis, and a deeply ethical lens to a subject often buried under technical jargon and political spin. This book is not just a recounting of catastrophe, but a stark reminder that, even in the face of individual and community resilience, science and policy fall short for those haunted by the permanence of radioactive contamination.
At the heart of the book lies a powerful question: What does it mean to live in a nuclear exclusion zone? Bass uses this inquiry to explore the “slow violence of radiation,” the enduring trauma of environmental contamination, the cultural amnesia that allows such disasters to fade from global consciousness, and the political and corporate machinery that enables this erasure. Rather than focusing on abstract debates, he humanizes the crisis by highlighting the lived experiences of those navigating the radioactive ruins of northeastern Japan. He remarks, “The process [of decontamination] is more about managing people’s perception of radiation than it is a solution.”
Rooting the book in personal and historical context, Bass recalls the surreal normalcy of growing up in a home adorned with photographs of mushroom clouds, reflecting his father’s involvement in fabricating both hydrogen (tritium) bombs and atomic bombs. Starting from this context, Bass links Fukushima to other sites of radioactive trauma—Chernobyl, Hanford, Bikini Atoll—framing them as part of a global pattern of technological arrogance, and recognizing the long-standing connection between civilian energy and military power.
Bass first visited Fukushima in 2018 and returned in 2022. His first trip revealed a superficial recovery, what he calls a “Potemkin” reconstruction aimed at showcasing Japan’s readiness for the Tokyo Olympics. By 2022, however, a more genuine—albeit cautious—resettlement was underway, with some people returning and farms being tentatively revived. Yet, even as the physical infrastructure was repaired, the psychic and ecological wounds lingered. Bass captures this tension with journalistic clarity and literary finesse.
Bass specifically relates his own encounter with radioactivity in a contaminated town in Japan — Namie: “As I get out of the car to photograph the bowling alley with the boat leaned against it, there is a metallic taste in my mouth, a lick of gunmetal.” Such moments remind readers that radiation, while invisible, is palpably real to those living with it daily.
Throughout the book, Bass offers a scathing critique of what he terms nuclear power’s “greenwashing.” Drawing from scientists, environmentalists, and historical evidence, he dissects the industry’s claims that nuclear energy is a safe, carbon-free solution to climate change. His tone is neither hysterical nor ideological; instead, it is sharply analytical and grounded. On the empty rhetoric of clean energy, he wryly notes, “Yes, plutonium is carbon-free. It will also kill you.”
Bass goes further by examining the systemic forces that allow nuclear risk to persist without accountability, laying bare the many attempts at covering over the severity of the ongoing nuclear catastrophe, including official lies about radioisotope content of contaminated water released into the Pacific, official allowable increases in the exposure limit to the public, and government gag orders placed on scientists. He delves into misinformation, regulatory failure, and public relations strategies that obscure the true costs—human and ecological—of nuclear energy.
In one of the book’s most disturbing passages, he highlights the Japanese government’s refusal to acknowledge radiation-related illnesses: “Doctors have left the area because the government refuses to reimburse them when they list radiation sickness as the cause for nose bleeds, spontaneous abortions, and other ailments resulting from ionizing radiation. (The only acceptable diagnoses are ‘radio-phobia,’ nervousness, and stress.)”
However, Return to Fukushima is not merely a catalog of policy failures or even a polemic against nuclear energy. It is above all an ethical and human-centered work. The personal stories Bass shares—such as those of the Kobayashis, who collaborate with Chernobyl survivors, or citizen scientists using homemade Geiger counters—bring dignity and agency to people often ignored by mainstream narratives. “‘You measure everything and keep measuring,’ says Takenori Kobayashi… ‘That’s the most important lesson we have learned from Chernobyl.’”
Despite these attempts at self-determination, Bass’s takeaway is a chilling question: “Is this what our future looks like? A daycare center full of radiation maps and equipment for monitoring our contaminated Earth?” The line encapsulates the book’s quiet horror and urgent relevance. As nations look to nuclear power as a climate solution, Bass reminds us that technological fixes without ethical grounding can cause irreversible harm.
Return to Fukushima is far more than a chronicle of disaster. It is a searing indictment of technological arrogance, a meditation on environmental justice, and a terrifying look into a future we can still largely avoid. With eloquence, empathy, and unflinching honesty, Thomas A. Bass confronts the radioactive legacy of our times. As Noam Chomsky aptly states, this is a book “so crucial that it bears on the survival of the earth.” Anyone interested in energy policy, environmental ethics, or the future of our planet should read it.
[Cindy Folkers is the radiation and health hazards specialist at Beyond Nuclear. Courtesy: Beyond Nuclear. Beyond Nuclear International (BNI) is an American news portal curated by Linda Pentz Gunter that seeks to tell the stories of the anti-nuclear struggle in a different way, with a focus on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.]
