SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
I was just 14 when, on the morning of March 13, 2011, I woke to a blaring siren and a chilling announcement echoing through my neighbourhood: “Stay at home, stay at home”.
Iwaki, my home town, stood on the edge of uncertainty – part of it was close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
In this video image taken from NTV Japan, smoke rises from Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Credit: NTV Japan
Two days before, a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan, triggering a 14-metre tsunami which flooded the power plant. Within an hour, power was lost, cooling systems failed, and three reactors began to overheat. Meltdowns followed, releasing radioactive materials and forcing the evacuation of more than 150,000 residents. Evacuation zones initially covered 12 per cent of Fukushima prefecture.
Although Australia does not experience as many earthquakes as Japan, there was a 4.6 magnitude earthquake in the Hunter Valley this week, with tremors felt as far south as Wollongong and as far west as the Blue Mountains.
After a series of earthquakes in the Hunter region last August, the Coalition declared its proposed nuclear sites in the region would be abandoned if studies revealed unacceptable risks.
However, former deputy prime minister and local politician Barnaby Joyce played down the risks, saying that any nuclear facility would be built to withstand a quake far more intense than the one experienced on Wednesday.
“These things are designed for vastly bigger earthquakes than anything that has been experienced in the Hunter Valley,” he said. “And if you look at it, Bayswater [a coal-fired power station just south of Muswellbrook] is still standing this morning.”
In Iwaki, as the siren blared, a sharp, bitter resentment surged within me. A few years before I had visited that nuclear power plant on a school excursion. A Tokyo Electric Power Company spokesperson had confidently told us that nuclear energy was “the cleanest and safest”. I even painted a poster celebrating nuclear energy’s bright future.
One day after the tsunami, with no water supply and empty supermarket shelves, we packed what we could and fled to family in Yokohama. Later I learnt that radiation levels in Iwaki had spiked – at 200 times greater than accepted radiation levels, based on the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency guidelines.
Iwaki’s radiation levels dropped quickly and it avoided significant contamination. As a result, it became a refuge for around 24,000 evacuees – including my high school friend, Ayaka Kai*.
I returned to my hometown in a month, but she lived in Okuma, the site of the power plant. Everyone there thought they’d soon return home, but they were wrong.
The whole population, more than 10,000 Okuma residents, left their town with no clue as to when they could return. Over the years, as decontamination efforts progressed, neighbouring municipalities slowly reopened, welcoming back former residents. However, 60 per cent of Okuma is not habitable, including Ayaka’s home, just four kilometres from the nuclear power plant. This area has been classified as a highly polluted zone with radiation levels more than 50 times higher than the accepted radiation levels.
The central area of Okuma town, Fukushima after evacuation orders were partially lifted.Credit: AP
In 2020, I joined Ayaka on a visit to her home, donning a white protective suit, gloves, and shoe covers. Inside, my dosimeter showed a relatively low reading – 1μSv per hour, about 8.76 mSv a year. But as I stepped into the backyard, the number on the screen jumped to 7μSv. Ayaka looked towards the dense trees behind her house and said softly, “The forest couldn’t be decontaminated.”
“Honestly, after going back two or three times to collect my things, I felt like that’s more than enough. The house will just continue to decay. I don’t really want to see it like that,” Ayaka explained. The beautiful garden Ayaka’s grandparents took care of had turned into a wild tangle of overgrown plants towering above our heads. Even wild boars had slipped through the home’s broken windows, making a mess inside.
Later, after Ayaka graduated from university in Fukushima, she began working at the newly established Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum in Futaba, next to her home town. The museum aims to ensure the nuclear power plant accident is not forgotten and to educate future generations.
At the museum, she organised memorial events and gave media interviews. Her presence became symbolic, and her co-worker encouraged her to become a storyteller. But beneath the surface, she was struggling. Within two years, in 2022, she resigned.
“My nuclear disaster experience hasn’t sunk in yet,” she later reflected. “Even though Fukushima’s reconstruction is moving forward, my home is still uninhabitable. People ask me what I want to pass on to the next generation, but I don’t know. I don’t even think I’m qualified to talk about it. I didn’t approve the plant’s construction. I didn’t cause the accident. I was just a junior high school student when it happened”.
Last year, she left for Christchurch, New Zealand, on a working holiday visa, seeking distance from the constant reminder of what she had lost. But at the same time, she did not want people to forget about Fukushima, and shared her story with a few local friends. She was struck by how hard it was for them to understand what it meant to lose their home town. New Zealand has no nuclear power plants; the concept felt distant.
Boars roam near a barricade restricting entry to “difficult-to-return zones” in Futaba, near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.Credit: AP
Australians seem to think the same, judging from my experience in Sydney. I’ll bet most people have no clue that the electricity generated by the Fukushima nuclear plant was sent straight to places like Tokyo – hundreds of kilometres away from the communities that have been forced to flee.
Peter Dutton has proposed sites like Lithgow and the Hunter Valley for future nuclear power stations. Like Fukushima, these places are far from metropolitan centres – yet the electricity would be sent to cities like Sydney. If a catastrophic accident were to occur, the city residents would not suffer as deeply as those living near the power plant.
Dutton also promotes Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) which are praised as compact and safer. But again, the proposed sites are in smaller towns like Port Augusta and Muja. It is rather funny how “safer” technology is not safe enough for capital cities.
In Japan, the nuclear industry rolls on. It has a history stretching back to the 1950s, employs approximately 50,000 people and involves more than 400 companies. It seems my country is locked into a path it cannot leave.
As we head into the May 3 election, the question arises: Are we ready to step onto the unequal, irreversible path?
*I used a pseudonym for Ayaka due to privacy concerns.
Ayumi Honda is a Japanese news reporter, currently working in Sydney.
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