Japan on Saturday marked the 12th anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disasters, when one of the world’s strongest earthquakes ever recorded triggered a deadly tsunami, leading to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
As every year, a minute of silence was observed in the country at 2:46 p.m. (5:46 a.m. in Lisbon), coinciding with the moment when, 12 years ago, an earthquake of magnitude 9 on the Richter scale shook the entire archipelago.
With its epicenter in the Pacific Ocean, off the northeast coast of Japan, the earthquake triggered a tsunami, the main cause of death or disappearance of about 18,500 people.
Waves inundated the Fukushima Daiichi plant, where the cores of three of the six reactors melted, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. Entire places were in the exclusion zone and uninhabited for years.
More than 1,650 square kilometers (km2) of Fukushima Prefecture, or 12% of the area, were shut down in the months after the nuclear disaster. Since then, intensive decontamination work has reduced these uninhabitable areas to 337 km2, or 2.4%.
In mid-January, Japanese courts upheld the acquittal of three former employees of Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima power plant, the only people criminally prosecuted in connection with this catastrophe and that they were innocent of negligence for the 2011 accident.
Officials said they expected the plant’s decontamination and decommissioning to take several decades.
One of the critical issues is the management of more than one million tons of contaminated water accumulated at the plant site, coming from rain, groundwater and the injections required to cool the reactor cores.
This water was treated, but the tritium, dangerous to humans in highly concentrated doses, could not be removed.
The Japanese government reiterated that it plans to start this year the very gradual release of these waters into the Pacific Ocean, a controversial project, but with favorable opinions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which oversees it, and from the Japanese nuclear regulator. .
Source: Observadora
