More alarm in Fukushima

On March 11 2011, the east coast of Japan suffered a violent earthquake, followed by a tsunami of unusual magnitude that, apart from wreaking massive personal and material damage, caused the nuclear incident at Fukushima. Four reactors were seriously damaged, with partial or total meltdown of the core. This called for a program of emergency refrigeration measures, which have continued until the present and will still be required in the near future, to dissipate the residual heat.

The huge quantities of contaminated water resulting from the process are being stored in tanks around the complex until some permanent solution can be found for them. However, it has now been found that in recent days one of these tanks has leaked at least 300 metric tons of radioactive water, there having been no control system that would have allowed the leak to be detected as it took place, such as, for example, level sensors in the tanks. This leak has been the gravest incident among the after-effects of the accident.

There have been significant, and indeed practically continual, spills into the Pacific Ocean

But this leak is far from the only unfortunate incident. For example, there have been significant, and indeed practically continual, spills into the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has expressed his distrust in the crisis-management capacities of the company that owns the power plant, Tepco. He also announced that Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has ordered an exhaustive study of the whole question of contaminated-water management, including the hundreds of other tanks that, as far as is known, have lost none of their water. Meanwhile, in a report released in May, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) highlighted the importance of the contaminated-water problem, and has offered its assistance to the Japanese authorities.

This new incident, whose causes are not yet clear and whose details are unknown, is likely to have important consequences. On the one hand, a series of neighboring countries, such as China and South Korea, have expressed their concern about the contamination of the sea, and have demanded explanations from the Japanese. On the other, the incident compromises any plan to reopen a majority of Japan’s nuclear plants.

In the months after the Fukushima disaster, Japan shut down the rest of the country’s reactors — many of which have no operative problems — as a precautionary measure. But this safety-first policy is now seen to have also brought negative consequences to the country. These consequences are largely economic, but are also of an environmental nature, given that the energy sources being used as replacements proceed mainly from natural gas, a fossil fuel that generates greenhouse emissions.