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September 1961: the local council of Ōkuma city, Fukushima passed the resolution inviting Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to build Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in its territory.

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September 1961: the local council of Ōkuma city, Fukushima passed the resolution inviting Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to build Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in its territory.

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Fukushima County, located in the northeast of Honshu Island, used to be one of the main coal producing areas in the Meiji period (1868-1912). However, as the rise of oil after the second world war, the coal industry was facing unprecedented challenges, until 1976, when Fukushima failed in getting through the crisis and closed its last coal mine. During the recession of the traditional mining industry, the local government turned to nuclear energy, which was regarded as a technology of the future. In 1961, the councils of two adjacent cities on the pacific coast, Okuma and Futaba, successively passed resolutions to invite Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to build a nuclear power plant in their territories. This was what came to be known as Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In the following 20 years, its all six reactors began operations, marking the arrival of the Nuclear Age.

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March 2011: the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami attacked Fukushima coast, causing the most serious nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster.

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March 2011: the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami attacked Fukushima coast, causing the most serious nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster.

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On March 11th, 2011, with a 9.0-magnitude earthquake that almost “shifted the Earth off its axis” and “shortened the earth’s day,” an unprecedented huge tsunami attacked the east coast of Honshu Island. As soon as the earthquake was detected, most nuclear power plants along the coast immediately dropped the control rods into the core to stop the nuclear reaction and successfully kept the reactor cores cool using emergency power supply. The latter step was necessary, since without extra cooling the reactor would still release large amounts of “decay heat” even after the reaction ceased. However, it was not accomplished in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, when the billow inundated the emergency diesel generators that were put in the basement of the turbine buildings only 4 meters over the sea level. From the first to the third reactor, overheating nuclear fuel melted down the containment vessel of the core, causing several chemical explosions, releasing a massive amount of radioactive contaminant into the sea and the air. More than 19,000 people were killed by the tsunami or the earthquake, and although the nuclear disaster hardly caused any casualty, it forced the government to evacuate over 164,000 residents from the 230-square-mile region near the power plant, making it the most serious nuclear accident by far after the Chernobyl accident.

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Fukushima's nuclear emergency - by Nature Video

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March 2013: the owner of the power plant TEPCO introduced the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to treat the highly radioactive water, but was constantly plagued by a series of problems in the following two years.

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March 2013: the owner of the power plant TEPCO introduced the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to treat the highly radioactive water, but was constantly plagued by a series of problems in the following two years.

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After the chemical explosion caused by overheating reactor cores that had melted down the containment vessel, in order to cool the reactors, TEPCO staff had to let groundwater on the mountain flow into the power plant and mix with the rainwater and seawater. The mixture, after being polluted by the nuclear waste, became highly radioactive, and since at that time, with limited purification techniques that can only remove Cesium from the pollutants, the water would still be a dangerous threat to the environment even after treatment and could not be discharged into the ocean, large tanks were built to store the water on the land. However, it is not a permanent solution: once new disasters or accidents happen, the poisonous water just stored near the shore will leak into the sea again (actually it was what happened in August, 2013, see the next tab). In order to address the problem thoroughly, in March 2013, TEPCO introduced and started the trial run of the new Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) which as they claimed could remove almost all kinds of radioactive elements in the polluted water except Tritium. Despite the controversy among countries about the hazard of remaining Tritium, the successful operation of ALPS would definitely improve the security situation of the power plant. The thing is, because of frequent negligence of TEPCO, ALPS was hardly able to work normally during the following two years. In fact, TEPCO planned to start the trial run in December, 2012, but delayed it for four months due to the low robustness of the water containers, which already revealed the carelessness of TEPCO staff. Then, only three months after the start of the trail run, ALPS was taken offline when radioactive water was found corroding its pipe and basin, raising questions about whether TEPCO could win the fight against nuclear pollution. In September, the trial run was restarted, but was halted the next day since the “rubber sheet left in a water tank near the system was obstructing the drain outlet.” In June, 2014, TEPCO “resumed operations of the problem-plagued radioactive water treatment system” but found a leakage of highly radioactive water again in January 2015.

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August 2013: 300 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the temporary tanks, leading to the most severe problem since the explosion in 2011.

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August 2013: 300 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the temporary tanks, leading to the most severe problem since the explosion in 2011.

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As more and more groundwater was piped into the power plant to cool down the reactor cores and flew out ceaselessly after mixing with highly radioactive rainwater and seawater, the number of tanks used to store the polluted water was increasing, and until 2013, 1000 tanks had already been built. It was such a heavy task that TEPCO could not withstand the trouble and started to build some temporary tanks that were “made of steel plates bolted together with waterproof packing to seal the seams,” less watertight than normal ones but easier to build. There were totally 350 tanks like that, which later became the main reason for a serious accident.

In august 2013, TEPCO reported that about 300 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of the temporary tanks because of its low robustness. “The amount of beta rays being emitted by radioactive materials in the leaked water, including strontium, was 80 million becquerels per liter, Tepco said” Instead of directly flowing into the ocean, the water might be contained “a 30-cm-high waterproof concrete barrier surrounding dozens of tanks” and would seep slowly into the ground; however, the most critical thing was, the huge amount of polluted water did not leak in just one day but a 30-day long period, in which the staff of TEPCO never noticed any trace of the accident. The leak revealed the poor management and low ability to prevent accidents, and made the then prime minister Abe Shinzo “lose faith in Tepco's ability to handle the water crisis without government help.” The Nuclear Regulation Authority classified it as a level one incident but the next day raised the rating into level three, which corresponds to a “serious accident,” and made the leak the most serious problem since the disaster in 2011. In April, 2014, TEPCO confessed that the leaked “water contained 280 million becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive materials such as strontium-90,” much higher than the number 80 million becquerels that was declared last year. The uncertainty had aroused wide concern among the public.

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Fukushima nuclear plant still leaking radioactive water, operator reveals

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April 2021: the Japanese government approved the discharge of nuclear polluted water into the Pacific Ocean.

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April 2021: the Japanese government approved the discharge of nuclear polluted water into the Pacific Ocean.

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On April 13, 2021, Japanese government approved the discharge of Nuclear water treated by ALPS into the ocean. This decision immediately provoked strong opposition among neighboring countries and experts all over the world, even after the authority and TEPCO said most poisonous radioactive matters were removed except Tritium, which, according to Kyodo, “is said to pose little health risk in low concentrations.” Although Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide insisted that the decision was safe and unavoidable, the misoperations caused by constant negligence of TEPCO and the government’s hesitation had made it hard to trust them. On April 27, The spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Wang Wenbin pointed out that the information disclosure and transparency of Japan was "selective" and “not timely.” He also mentioned several accidents caused by TEPCO’s carelessness and slow response, in which the most serious one was the leak in August 2013. (See padlet 4) The Professor of the Department of international politics of Fudan University, Shen Yi called attention to the truth that the Fukushima nuclear disaster itself was caused by the delay and poor management of TEPCO and the Japanese authority was not “trustworthy.” The Korea Time questioned the safety of the water, saying that ALPS was a failure “as recognized officially by the Tokyo Electric Power Company in 2018”, and “over 70 percent of the wastewater after initial treatment contained 100 times higher cesium-127 and 20,000 times higher strontium-90 than safety levels.” (ALPS is introduced in podcast 3.) Experts from the UN were also “deeply disappointed” by Japan's decision since “alternative solutions to the problem are available.”