As Japan assesses the injury from Monday’s main earthquake, it’s nonetheless reckoning with the devastating nuclear disaster triggered by an quake almost 13 years in the past, one which positioned the identify of Fukushima on par with Chernobyl’s and traumatized the nation.
In March 2011, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake and a tsunami devastated the northeast coast of Japan and knocked out cooling programs at three of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s reactors, inflicting a triple meltdown that spewed radioactive fallout over giant swaths of land round it.
The quake and tsunami killed greater than 19,000 individuals, and the nuclear calamity, certainly one of historical past’s worst, raised alarms around the globe. Tens of 1000’s of individuals had been evacuated from cities and farming villages across the plant, and a decade later some nonetheless had not returned.
Final summer season, the federal government introduced that it might begin releasing the handled water into the ocean. The Worldwide Atomic Power Company declared that the federal government’s plan had met the company’s security requirements, but it surely nonetheless raised objections from some scientists, anxiousness amongst fishermen who feared it might harm their enterprise, and tensions with the Chinese language and South Korean governments.
All of Japan’s nuclear reactors had been shut after the 2011 disaster, and far of its nuclear energy program stays shuttered.
