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March 11, 2024
On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, occurred off the Pacific coast of the Tohoku region. This massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami set off a severe accident at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which was rocked by explosions. A horrific amount of radioactive material was released into the environment.
13 years have passed since then, but the accident is not yet over. In particular, the cleanup of the nuclear plant where the accident occurred is painfully slow. While it is said to be a cleanup, it is proving impossible to determine what state is being aimed for or what the final state will be. The existence of radioactivity makes it so. Will the accident be brought to an end 30 to 40 years after it occurred? We are unable to make that prediction. It is feared that the work will take 100 years.
Everyone was surely hoping that such a severe accident would never happen again. It turned out that, when faced with harsh natural phenomena, nuclear power plant systems could not be controlled by technology. The Japanese government’s so-called ‘Green Transformation (GX) policy,’ however, calls for a return to nuclear power plants in in the name of a response to climate change, just as if it were now expedient to ignore the severe accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
It is said that nuclear power plants are indispensable for decarbonization and that work on next-generation nuclear reactors will be carried out with the full support of the government. However, literature reviews for nuclear waste repositories, what to do with spent nuclear fuel, and the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, the backbone of the nuclear fuel cycle, are at a standstill with no outlook for the foreseeable future. As if they didn’t already know that.
The nuclear energy policy has been a failure for years, but the government shows no sign of reviewing it.
In the evening of the very first day of this year, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula. Houses collapsed, roads were cut off, the ground subsided, and a tectonic shift raised the Earth’s crust up to four meters. Although termed a natural disaster, this is a natural activity that occurs repeatedly due to the activity of the Earth. It cannot be controlled by technology.
The two reactors at Hokuriku Electric Power Co.’s Shika Nuclear Power Plant in Ishikawa Prefecture, where the earthquake occurred, have been shut down since the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, but still suffered serious damage. The planned Suzu nuclear power plant was abandoned due to persistent citizen opposition, but had it been built right on the tip of the peninsula, there would undoubtedly have been a major accident outstripping the Fukushima nuclear accident. Evacuation would have been difficult, and people would have been exposed to lethal doses of radiation.
The nuclear emergency declaration issued 13 years ago on March 11 has still not been lifted. There is little option but for the Japanese government to recognize that it is not possible, since safety must be a priority, to site nuclear power plants in the Japanese archipelago, one of the world’s most tectonically active areas.
