Aizuwakamatsu to Fukushima
June 6, 2023
Leaving Aizuwakamatsu was not a picnic. We started right into our first climb of the day but with early morning commuter traffic added to the mix. None of us were sorry to see the route finally veer off the well traveled path and into more rural surroundings. It was another day of climbs this time up into the hills formed by the volcano that we could see from our lunch stop the day before. Mount Bandai, while not as big a Mount Aso encountered earlier in the trip, was still a formidable taskmaster. However, once we made it to the top of the climb we were treated to some outstanding views including a look back to where we we ate lunch yesterday. As we climbed and circumnavigated our way around the numerous volcanoes in this area we could see where the caldera blowout of 1888 still scars the land.
Further on we could see steam rising from Mount Azuma-kofuji, another active volcano from this land of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. We could also see signs of how Covid wrecked parts of the Japanese economy and how some enterprising businesses are trying to bring it back.
However, the story of the day is our journey down from volcano-land to the city of Fukushima. You may wonder why that name sounds familiar as did I. On 11 March 2011, at 14:46 JST (05:46 UTC), a 9.0–9.1 undersea earthquake occurred in the Pacific Ocean, 72 km (45 mi) east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tōhoku region. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the fourth largest on record in the world. It created tsunami waves that may have reached heights of up to 40.5 meters (133 ft) and which traveled 10 kilometers inland. The residents of Sendai had only ten minutes of warning before waves traveling at nearly 700 kilometers per hour struck their city. The official figures released in 2021 reported 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,553 people missing. However, the story that captured the world’s attention was what happened at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
When the earthquake struck, automated systems automatically shut down the reactors and a series of safety protocols were enacted. The reactor shutdown interrupted the electrical supply triggering the backup generators to supply power to the critical cooling systems in the reactor itself. However, the tsunami that followed the earthquake washed over the reactor walls and flooded the backup generators causing the cooling system to fail and the reactor to overheat to the point of meltdown. This resulted in three hydrogen gas explosions that breached reactor containment and released radioactive contamination into the air for the next four days. All told, some 110,000 residents were evacuated from the communities surrounding the plant due to the rising off-site levels of ambient ionizing radiation caused by airborne radioactive contamination from the damaged reactors. Even larger amounts of radioactive materials were released into the ocean.
Since 2011 the Japanese government has instituted a massive clean up campaign and local radiation levels in this area are now back to pre 2011 levels. There have also been changes in operational protocols and backup generator locations and redundancy instituted here and at many other nuclear power generation facilities around the world. It was a difficult and expensive lesson to be learned especially in the cost of human lives. Before those reading this put this experience among their reasons why nuclear power is bad, I should point out that all forms of energy production have a cost in both environmental and human terms. Coal production costs lives and destroys large swatches of land. Natural gas and the fracking and water injection used to produce it contaminate ground water. Solar and wind are not free rides either. Every form of energy has its price and when you total the cost nuclear is no worse than most and generally better environmentally even with Fukushima and other accidents that we hopefully learn something from. In any event, I sleep tonight in Fukushima and I shall sleep soundly and without worries.
