Our gas masks are on, as are three pairs of gloves secured with tape, two pairs of socks, rubber boots, a hard hat and a hazmat suit that encases our bodies in polyethylene. Ice packs cool our torsos, but photographer Dominic Nahr, reporter Chie Kobayashi and I start sweating. Maybe it’s nerves, or maybe it’s just the sticky humidity of summertime Japan.
Soon we approach the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant—ground zero of the worst atomic meltdown since Chernobyl. Dosimeters around our necks record the rising levels of radiation. After the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, the aging plant on Japan’s northeastern coast suffered a total power failure, causing the cooling system to shut down. Three of the station’s nuclear-reactor cores overheated, sending plumes of radiation over a placid landscape of fishing villages, rice paddies and dairy farms. (The station has a total of six reactors. Two were in cold shutdown at the time of the accident; another, which had been defueled, suffered an explosion.) As we lumber through the plant like clumsy B-movie extras, I’m reminded that our many layers don’t protect against every type of radiation. Not to worry, we are told by officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO). The radiation levels in certain parts of the nuclear complex are actually lower than in some populated swaths of Fukushima prefecture. Later, as I sit in a futuristic cubicle in the plant complex, undergoing a full-body internal radiation check, the soundtrack underscores TEPCO’s soothing message. A line from one song’s lyrics, tinkly and sweetened: “You’ve got a friend in Jesus.”
Three and a half years after the most devastating nuclear accident in a generation, Fukushima Daiichi is still in crisis. Some 6,000 workers, somehow going about their jobs despite the suffocating gear they must wear for hours at a time, struggle to contain the damage. So much radiation still pulses inside the crippled reactor cores that no one has been able to get close enough to survey the full extent of the destruction. Every 2½ days, workers deploy a new giant storage tank to house radioactive water contaminated after passing through the damaged reactors. We wander past a forest of some 1,300 of these tanks, each filled with 1,000 tons of toxic water, some of which was used to cool the reactors.
Leaks have plagued the site. In February, water with a radiation level several million times higher than what’s safe gushed out from a storage tank near the coast on the Pacific Ocean. TEPCO said it was unlikely the water made its way into the ocean, but whistle-blower workers aren’t as sure. There’s the question of what will happen when—not if—another major earthquake strikes this seismically cursed land. The latest plan by TEPCO, Japan’s largest power provider, is to build a wall of frozen earth around the damaged reactors and other highly radioactive areas to prevent radiation from seeping out of the site. But even if this and other technological fixes succeed, the government estimates it will take at least 30 years to decommission Fukushima Daiichi and make the site safe from radiation.
Japan took all of its other 48 nuclear power plants off-line after Fukushima, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to restart some of them despite public opposition. Commissioned in 1971, Fukushima Daiichi should have been retired or retrofitted long before a 46-ft. (14 m) tsunami forced the issue. Touring the site, I’m struck by how much of the damage remains. It’s not just the throbbing danger of the unseen nuclear-fuel rods. The carcasses of the reactors themselves are exposed in places like autopsied remains, stained from the soot of the hydrogen explosions that resulted from the meltdown. We walk into a building that housed the control room for Reactors 1 and 2, where a dozen workers, plunged into darkness by the power cut, labored by flashlight to try to achieve cold shutdown.
In the control room, amid the rows of screens and panels, calculations scrawled on metal by engineers represent the desperate graffiti of men who could not halt a nuclear meltdown. Electricity was not restored until March 24, nearly two weeks after the tsunami. “We have to honestly and deeply reflect on the accident,” says Takafumi Anegawa, TEPCO’s managing executive officer, whose role is to shake up a utility he has accused of cozy relations with regulators and a cavalier attitude toward safety. “We should reset the level we pursue to the very highest. If we cannot achieve that level because of our capability or our culture, it means we are not qualified.” Akira Ono, the plant superintendent at Fukushima Daiichi, is equally blunt—at least in a Japanese context—about the need to reassess the nation’s nuclear future. “Because of the accident,” he says, “nuclear energy is an issue that should be discussed again in our country.”
There’s no question that Fukushima Daiichi is a huge test for TEPCO—and for Japan. Yet the destroyed plant feels enervated and empty, like a Hollywood version of a nuclear wasteland. Thousands of workers may be on the payroll, but few are in evidence. The protective suits slow everyone down, masking any sense of urgency. Just outside the destroyed reactors, in a swath of Fukushima declared uninhabitable for mankind, azaleas are in full bloom. A rabbit hops across the road—I wonder where, in this devastated landscape, it is going.
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