Japan this Saturday marked the 12th anniversary of the disasters of March 11, 2011, when one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the world triggered a deadly tsunami leading to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
As every year, a minute of silence was observed in the country at 2:46 pm (5:46 am in Lisbon), when 12 years ago the entire archipelago was shaken by an earthquake measuring 9 on the Richter scale.
With its epicenter in the Pacific Ocean, off Japan’s northeast coast, the earthquake triggered a tsunami, the leading cause of death or disappearance of nearly 18,500 people.
The waves engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi plant, where the cores of three of the six reactors melted, forcing tens of thousands of people to be evacuated. Entire sites lay in the exclusion zone for many years and were uninhabited.
More than 1,650 square kilometers (km2) of Fukushima prefecture, or 12% of its area, were closed in the months following the nuclear disaster. Since then, intensive remediation work has reduced these uninhabitable areas to 337 km2, or 2.4%.
In mid-January, Japanese courts upheld the acquittal of three former employees of Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the only individuals to face criminal charges in connection with this disaster and who were innocent of negligence before the 2011 accident.
Authorities said they expected the decontamination and dismantling of the plant to take decades.
One of the critical issues is the management of more than a million tons of contaminated water that has accumulated on the plant grounds, from rain, groundwater and the injections needed to cool the reactor cores.
This water was purified, but the tritium, dangerous to humans in very high concentrated doses, could not be removed.
The Japanese government reiterated its intention to begin this year the very gradual release of these waters into the Pacific Ocean, a controversial project, but with favorable advice from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which oversees it, and the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Agency.
Source: DN
