Life in the Red Zone

The following essay is adapted from “Return to Fukushima,” published this month by OR Books.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we have been alerted daily to the possibility that one or more of the country’s 15 nuclear reactors might be on the verge of catastrophic failure. This might resemble what happened at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 when three nuclear reactors exploded. In Japan, it was an earthquake and tidal wave that knocked out the generators and pumps that cooled the plant. In Ukraine, it is missiles and artillery that are pushing the reactors toward station blackout. But no matter the cause, nuclear fuel deprived of cooling water is like a dirty bomb primed to explode.    

Likely to repeat itself, if not in Ukraine then somewhere else in the world, the Fukushima disaster is also in the news because the destroyed reactors continue to leak large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere and ocean. For a dozen years, the plant has been cooled with water that is now radioactive. In the summer of 2023, more than a million tons of this water, collected in over a thousand tanks, began being released into the Pacific Ocean. 

The world is dotted with nuclear exclusion zones. Atolls blown to smithereens. Test sites in Nevada’s Great Basin. Hanford’s plutonium-producing reactors along the Columbia River. Disasters at Mayak and other Soviet bomb-making factories. The red forest at Chernobyl. These zones are growing in number and melding one into another. What if our future demands that we learn how to live in nuclear exclusion zones? Learn how to master the risks and develop resistant crops and other survival skills? 

Nowhere is this future more evident than in Fukushima, where the Japanese government is pushing people to resettle in towns that are supposedly decontaminated. These attempts have largely failed. But what has not failed are the grassroots efforts at reviving Fukushima. This is propelled by the ingenuity of local farmers and entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, artists and immigrants from around the world who are intrigued by starting new lives in the red zone. Think of Fukushima as the Japanese equivalent of America’s Wild West — a meritocracy where skill not social class or caste is coalescing into local communities that rely on their own tools and knowledge for survival.

Before they began flushing radioactive effluent into the Pacific Ocean, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, opened the plant to tours by a group called Real Fukushima, which aims to highlight positive developments in the area. On the day of my tour, a dozen people have gathered in a building near to the Odaka train station for an introductory briefing. We are handed a piece of paper advising us that we will not be doing dark tourism like the 2018 Netflix documentary on Fukushima. We will not be breaking into abandoned pachinko parlors and wandering through the empty houses that still litter the coast. Despite the elevated readings on our dosimeters, we will be taking calculated risks for limited periods of time. This includes the 10 minutes allotted for standing on the viewing platform built overlooking Fukushima’s ruined reactors. 

My fellow tourists include a young woman from New Zealand, various expatriates living in Tokyo and a French engineer from a big multinational corporation that builds solar farms. I am traveling with Junko Takahashi, a Japanese woman fluent in Spanish and English who works as my fixer. She arranges meetings, translates interviews, drives on the left side of the road and corrects my cultural missteps with Japanese protocol. As the rest of the group is ushered into a tour bus, Junko, the French engineer and I are put in a car driven by Shuzo Sasaki. A retired government official, Sasaki is described on Real Fukushima’s website as their “manager,” although he tells us he is only a “volunteer.” In any case, he turns out to be a high-speed driver over back roads he knows intimately.

On this windy day, which promises to turn into a soaking storm, our first stop is the house of Sasaki’s father. He was forced to evacuate in 2011 as Fukushima’s reactors exploded and a toxic stew of noble gases and radioactive particles blew inland. He lived in temporary housing until 2017, when radiation levels had dropped enough to allow parts of the area’s abandoned towns to be resettled. A stately man in his 90s, Sasaki’s father is happy to be back home, but we have not come for a social visit. 

Sasaki walks us behind the house, into a grove of trees, and points his radiation detector toward the ground. We watch the numbers race upward. To live in a nuclear exclusion zone, one has to familiarize oneself with the pantheon of particles that can kill you, the kinds of radiation they emit and the different ways to avoid this radiation. Today we are measuring gamma radiation in units known as sieverts (Sv). Named after Swedish physicist Rolf Sievert, this unit measures the impact of radiation on human bodies. It is used for computing dose rates over time, such as yearly exposure. These doses are often measured in milli– or microsieverts, one one-thousandth or one one-millionth of a sievert.

A burst dose of 0.75 Sv will produce nausea and a weakened immune system. A dose of 10 Sv will kill you immediately. A dose somewhere in between gives you a 50-50 chance of dying within 30 days. Guidelines for workers in the nuclear industry in Japan limit the maximum yearly dose to 0.02 Sv. (This is equivalent to 20 millisieverts, or a couple of CT scans, which can deliver surprisingly large doses of radiation.) 

So how many sieverts are Fukushima’s melted reactors producing? The latest reading from inside reactor No. 2 is 530 Sv per hour. This means that every hour the reactor is emitting more than 25,000 times the yearly allowable dose for radiation workers. With reactors this hot, Japan’s plan to scoop up Fukushima’s nuclear fuel and dump it somewhere, which is projected to take 40 years, may not be possible. In this case, Fukushima, like Chernobyl, will have to be entombed in three giant pyramids of concrete, which will be Japan’s legacy to the archaeologists of the Anthropocene.

Sasaki’s woods are not as radioactive as F1’s containment vessels, but this is not a good place to linger. “It’s safe enough for my father to stay inside his house,” Sasaki says. “But this stand of trees is another story. It got hit by the cloud blowing inland from F1, and even today it is more radioactive than the land around it.”

Fukushima in general looks like this. Houses have been washed down and schoolyards and fields have been scraped of topsoil to decontaminate them. Asphalt walkways and roads with diminished levels of radioactivity connect the clean spots. The rest of the area, officially called the “difficult-to-return zone,” including the 75% of coastal Fukushima that is covered by forests, is still dangerous or closed to visitors or marked with signs warning people to drive through as quickly as possible. 

Our next stop is Cowzilla. Modelled on Godzilla, the Japanese monster created by fallout from the hydrogen bomb, Cowzilla is a radioactive cow, in this case, a statue mounted on the back of a pickup truck, surrounded by antinuclear slogans, that its owner, a cattle rancher named Masami Yoshizawa, drives around the country to rallies protesting nuclear power. Yoshizawa has just returned from Tokyo, where Cowzilla registered Yoshizawa’s disgust at the pomp displayed for Shinzo Abe’s state funeral. Before he was assassinated by a gunman who objected to Abe’s affiliation with the Korean religious sect run by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the former prime minister was a big booster for nuclear energy in Japan. 

After F1 exploded, Yoshizawa and other local farmers were ordered to kill their radioactive cows. Instead, he rounded up abandoned animals and allowed them to roam free on the 80-acre farm he had inherited from his father. “My animals were like my children,” he says. “There was no way I could kill them.” Resistance by Yoshizawa and other farmers was usually quiet and personal. Even in Yoshizawa’s case, although he was arrested several times for entering the nuclear exclusion zone to collect abandoned animals, he was always released quickly after signing a paper saying that he would never do it again. 

Racing through the rest of our tour, we visit the big new museum built to commemorate the disaster — a multimillion-dollar, three-story building filled with information about the earthquake and atomic meltdowns. We drive onto one of the new concrete breakwalls built to protect 300 miles of Japan’s eastern coast. We visit the school where 80 students and 10 teachers were saved by running up a nearby hill. When I last saw this building in 2018, it was nothing more than a mildewed wreck standing in a field emptied of all the nearby buildings. Today the school is a stop on Fukushima’s dark tourism tour — which we seem to be following, despite our earlier instructions. There is a kiosk charging admission and the classrooms have been restored to what they looked like on 3/11 (as the disaster is known in Japan, like 9/11 in the United States). Chernobyl and other nuclear exclusion zones are filled with sites like this — ghostly imprints of what the world will look like at the end of time, when humans are gone and nature is reclaiming our crumbling cities and lost civilizations. 

We are driving through Futaba, staring at the vine-covered houses in this abandoned town, when Sasaki suddenly veers off the road and drives up to a car parked under a breezeway. He hops out to greet Yasushi Hosozawa, 78. Hosozawa is one of the two people who have moved back to Futaba after the town was declared decontaminated and officially re-opened in 2022. The other occupant in what was once a town of 7,000 people is a retired bicycle racer in poor health. “Life was good here,” Hosozawa says, “but now I walk around and the streets are empty. There is nowhere to shop and nothing to do. Even when I take my boat out and go fishing, the catch is no good. The black current has come up from the south. All we’re getting are pufferfish instead of flounder.” Vicious creatures whose teeth can cut through wire, pufferfish, also known as fugu, are one of Japan’s deadly delicacies. Eating the fish produces a nice little buzz, unless, as happens a few times every year, the neurotoxins in the fish’s liver and ovaries kill you. 

Hosozawa says he doesn’t even recognize the officials who are running the town. “I don’t like the government at the moment,” he says. “They lie about the radiation levels. They tell us it’s safe to walk where the land has been decontaminated, but if you wander a few feet to the left or right, the levels shoot up and you realize this place isn’t safe at all.” The reopening of Futaba and Fukushima’s other heavily irradiated towns is something of a PR stunt. A town is reopened when 15% of the land has been “decontaminated.” Even that term is misleading. Radioactive particles can be moved from one place to another, but this does not decrease their toxicity, and they can easily be swept back into town with the next rainstorm. Cesium adheres to dust and clay, which is why it continues to build up in Fukushima’s riverbeds and ponds. 

We drive south to Okuma, another abandoned town built next to four of Fukushima’s six reactors. We rejoin the rest of the group at the Tepco Decommissioning Archive Center, one of the area’s new museums. The archive center is devoted to lauding the Tokyo Electric Power Company for its technical skill and bravery in keeping the Fukushima disaster from spiraling into chaos. Actually, Tepco has a long history of technical malfeasance and outright chicanery. It has admitted to decades of forging safety reports and lying about accidents at its power plants. The disaster at Fukushima was not a black swan event. All the official reports have concluded that the disaster was foreseen and that it could have been prevented. It should not be called an accident, and it was not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. 

The person greeting us at the door says that Tepco is sorry for the disaster and the harm the company has caused the people of Fukushima. We watch several videos, and the last one says that Tepco is sorry for the “arrogance and overconfidence on our part.” These statements are as mechanical as a Japanese bow. As Tadaaki Sawada, an official at the fishermen’s federation later explains, “Whenever Tepco comes to see us and tell us about a spill or a leak or some other problem at the plant, they say, ‘We are sorry.’ But they never apologize. It is just a formula, a reflex that allows them to carry on doing whatever they want to do.” 

The briefers supply us with a stack of documents explaining how the company plans to decommission its nuclear reactors. The documents fail to mention that Tepco has already jettisoned five previous plans and that the company actually has no idea how to remove the massive amounts of nuclear fuel that remain in three of its reactors. Even locating where the fuel is scattered remains a mystery. After the briefing, we tour a display of robots outfitted with cameras, including submersible robots that swim into the flooded reactors. Tepco neglects to mention that for half a decade these robots failed to send any images from inside the still-hot reactor cores. “Our robots burned up and died,” Junko, my assistant, says. “I was so embarrassed. I thought we had the best robots in the world, and they proved a failure. We had to borrow robots from America before we got our first look inside the reactors.”  

We are loaded onto a company bus and driven through the guarded gates at F1. Covering more than 800 acres, the site is a sprawling maze of water tanks and buildings, scrap yards, cranes, pylons, pump houses — everything needed to maintain 10 nuclear reactors, including the four at Fukushima Daini (Fukushima No. 2), which was built six miles down the coast. F2 was where F1’s workers fled when Fukushima Daiichi began exploding. F2’s reactors survived, but they, too, are now closed. 

The rain is picking up. We enter another building, where we are briefed with more videos and handouts. We are asked to empty our pockets and leave behind all cellphones, cameras and watches. We walk to another room, where we are given hard hats, radiation dosimeters, white cotton gloves and umbrellas to shield us from the rain that is now pouring down in sheets. We pass through whole-body radiation scanners — big metal gates that stay closed if they detect elevated levels of contamination. We board another bus and drive toward the coast where Fukushima’s destroyed reactors sit near the waterline. The power plant was built on an artificial beach that Tepco created when it cut nearly a hundred feet off an alluvial terrace. This decision to cut down a natural promontory and build the plant near the ocean proved its fatal flaw. Flooded by the 50-foot wave that washed over the shore, the seawater pumps and backup diesel generators failed. Deprived of cooling water during a station blackout, F1’s reactors began melting down and the power plants began exploding one after another. 

To reduce the groundwater seeping into its melted reactors, F1 has been paved with asphalt and loaded with sump pumps, drains, ditches and a mile-long “ice wall” meant to freeze the ground around the reactors and stop the river of water that flows through the plant. Costing more than $300,000,000 in public funds (34.5 billion yen), the ice wall is another Tepco failure. Water still flows down from the mountains, enters the reactors, and either seeps into the sea with a load of cesium and other radionuclides or gets pumped into the more than 1,000 holding tanks that cover the site. 

Our bus threads its way among F1’s holding tanks — huge structures, grain silos on steroids, holding 1.5 million tons of radioactive water. We pass a lead-shielded command center and three advanced liquid processing facilities, called Alps, which supposedly clean Fukushima’s contaminated water. The waste storage buildings and construction yards filled with cranes and earth-moving equipment make the site look more like a building project than a nuclear disaster. Mounted in the front of our bus is a radiation dosimeter with flashing red diodes. The numbers keep rising, as the gamma radiation around us, measured in microsieverts, climbs from 1.0 to 10 and up from there toward 100 microsieverts per second. This is much higher than the 3.8 microsieverts per hour that the government considers safe in Fukushima’s reopened areas. Our tour guide asks if anyone is having second thoughts about getting off the bus. All of us get off.

To our left is an asphalt-covered drainage ditch. In front of us is a metal staircase. We climb the stairs to find ourselves huddled in the rain on a viewing platform that looks down on Fukushima’s four ruined reactors. These still contain over 1,000 tons of radioactive fuel. We have 10 minutes to gaze on the site. At Chernobyl, the power plant that exploded in 1986 is a tomb, a concrete-encased pile of rubble known as the sarcophagus. Like the pyramids, it is a monument to death and human folly. Fukushima is a different kind of monument. Each of the four destroyed reactors is a building site, a technical puzzle for containing the radioactivity that is still leaking out of their melting cores. They stand on the beach next to each other, huge multistory boxes containing reactor cores, turbine halls and the miles of piping required to convert nuclear fission into hot water. The world’s nuclear reactors have never escaped their underworld origins. Chernobyl was a bomb-making factory that produced as an added benefit some hot water and electricity. Japan’s fleet of 54 atomic reactors and its plutonium separation program have produced an enormous stockpile of separated plutonium, more than 45 tons of plutonium, enough to make 6,000 atomic bombs, if Japan ever decided to build them.

As I look out to the Pacific, I am struck by the size of this industrial disaster, which will prove to be the world’s largest and most costly, at least until Zaporizhzhia or some other reactor explodes in the middle of Europe. All the ground around me is covered in brown asphalt, and no workers are in sight. Most terrifying is reactor No. 1, the farthest to the left and the oldest at the plant, a General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactor designed in the late 1960s. With its roof ripped off, we are staring down into the guts of the plant. A tangle of steel beams has been exploded skyward and landed in what looks like a giant game of pick-up-sticks. 

Decommissioning the plant will require removing one stick at a time — the work of robots, because the site is too lethal for humans. What lies under the tangle of exploded beams is the reactor’s spent fuel pool. This contains hundreds of fuel rods that are “spent” only in the sense of having been unloaded whenever the reactor was recharged with fresh fuel. A reactor’s spent fuel is more radioactive than its original uranium fuel. The rods are filled with the fission products, like radioactive iodine, strontium and cesium, that are produced in atomic reactors. Spent fuel pools have a deadly flaw, especially if they are packed tightly with rods. Deprived of water, the rods will heat up and eventually catch on fire. The worst-case scenario at Fukushima, and still a lingering risk, would come from having one or more of its fuel pools, open to the sky and filled with exposed fuel rods, catch on fire and start spreading radioactivity around the world.

While Unit 1 is a mess of tangled girders hanging over a ruined reactor, the rest of the site has been cleaned up, at least from the outside. Unit 2 has a new staging room built onto its side, a metal box for operating the robot arm that might eventually unload the reactor’s melted fuel. Unlike its neighbors, Unit 2 did not explode. Instead it had a hole ripped in its side from the explosion at Unit 1. Although it remained intact, Unit 2 is the most lethal of Fukushima’s reactors. It released the most radioactivity and is thought to contain the deadliest load of melted fuel. Like Unit 1, it has a spent fuel pool on its fifth floor. Covered with nothing more than a sheet-metal roof, this storage facility is ready to burn if emptied of water, or it could topple into the ocean after one of Japan’s all-too-frequent earthquakes. 

Unit 3 is distinguished by the vault built on top of the building. Here Tepco has succeeded in unloading the fuel pool from a power plant that exploded but retained enough structural integrity to allow cranes to be mounted over its roof. The same is true for Unit 4. The reactor was not working on March 11, 2011. Its core had been unloaded into a fuel pool, but the plant exploded nonetheless. This explains why the uranium fuel rods in units 1 and 2 are still fatally radioactive, while Unit 4 is now emptied of fuel and stabilized in a vast nest of cantilevered girders.

Snaking below us is the mile-long stretch of silver piping that supplies Fukushima’s ice wall with coolant. More piping leads to the three Alps plants that are supposed to clean Fukushima’s contaminated water. In 2018, during a news conference, Tepco was forced to admit that its cleaning system had failed. The news was obscured in a technical report, “buried in a massive amount of data, making it very difficult to find,” said Noriyuki Mizuno, a reporter for Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK. Along with massive amounts of tritium, Fukushima’s processed water contained another 63 radionuclides, including plutonium, strontium-90, cobalt-60 and a long list of other deadly elements. The level of strontium-90, for example, which, like calcium, concentrates in bones and teeth if it gets into human bodies, was 200,000 times above the legal limit. Even this accounting is incomplete, since the water might contain not 64 radioactive elements, but as many as 100. 

Originally designed by EnergySolutions, a waste hauler in Utah, Fukushima’s liquid processing system works by capturing ions — electrically charged particles — in filters that function like giant bathmats. When swapped out, the absorption filters are highly contaminated waste that must be stored for thousands of years. In 2018, Tepco said it was sorry for covering up their failure. The company said it was in a hurry, trying to protect worker safety, so it forced too much water through the system and neglected to change the filters frequently enough. Two years later, Tepco admitted that its treated water also contained high levels of carbon-14, and the company has always known that F1’s water would contain enormous amounts of tritium. A radioactive form of hydrogen and the fuel in hydrogen bombs, tritium is impossible to remove from water. Every nuclear reactor in the world releases tritium in its cooling water, and the entire industry is based on the presumption that tritium, an emitter of beta particles with a half-life of a dozen years, poses little risk to human health. (Recent research on how tritium enters the food chain is challenging this assumption.) 

Tepco built a second Alps processing system and then another one, promising each time to have mastered the process, but even today the company admits that three-quarters of the water in its holding tanks is contaminated with radionuclides other than tritium, at levels above what is allowed to be released into the ocean. “At the time they issued their approval, the IAEA had no idea of what was in the water apart from what Tepco had told them,” says Azby Brown, lead researcher for Safecast, one of the citizen science groups that has been denied permission to test the water. The Japanese press censors itself so thoroughly that even the word “contaminated” must be avoided when discussing what Tepco insists on calling its “treated” water. 

We huddle together on the viewing platform for a group photo before being led back to the bus. We drive past the Alps processing plants and waste storage buildings and retrace our steps toward the whole-body scanners. Before returning to the clean zone, we are asked to pause for another photo. Each one of us is given the opportunity to hold a vial of Tepco’s treated water and smile for the camera. The stunt is surprisingly amateurish. Next to the vial of treated water is another vial filled with bath salts. The radium in the bath salts moves the needle on a Geiger counter. The treated water registers nothing. A few days after our tour, when this stunt was criticized by one of the few Japanese reporters willing to question Tepco’s plans, the company announced that its vial of treated water had developed a crack, and the demonstration was halted.