Thomas A. Bass, Return to Fukushima (London: O/R Books, 2025), 197pp.
For supporters of nuclear power, what happened at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, is the ultimate demonstration of the technology’s safety. Even in an extreme natural disaster, a tsunami which killed 20,000 people, and a nightmare scenario in which three reactors at Fukushima melted down and one exploded, there were no immediate deaths. As the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the COP26 talks in 2021, ‘no one died from radiation.’1 Bass’s work on the effects of the Fukushima disaster shows, however, that the real picture is decidedly less rosy.
One problem with declaring low casualty figures for nuclear disasters is that radiation can kill slowly. Those who may die in the disaster or shortly afterwards from radiation poisoning, like the 54 official casualties from Chernobyl, are the tip of an iceberg of untimely deaths and impaired health from a range of problems ultimately caused by radiation exposure. Even by 2021, the statement that no one died from radiation at Fukushima contained rather more caveats than may have been apparent to much of the audience. It was true that no one died of radiation poisoning in the immediate aftermath, but in 2018, one worker died from lung cancer caused by radiation, and the official death toll now stands at six. This is likely to be a considerable underestimate, since the Japanese government makes it a condition for its ‘consolation payments’ that the family agree for the death not to be listed as an official Fukushima fatality (p.86).
This manipulation of the official fatality figures is just one of the ways in which the Japanese government attempts to minimise the ongoing consequences of Fukushima. The official line, as Shinzo Abe declared in 2018, is that the situation at Fukushima is ‘under control’ (p.107). The area has been cleaned up and reopened, with the torch relay for the 2020 Summer Olympics in 2021 starting from Fukushima, and everything is fine. This, Bass shows, is far from the truth.
Japan significantly undercounts the number of internally displaced people from the Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone. The official count is 22,727, but at least 160,000 people fled from the disaster, and it was reported in 2023 that at that point, only just over 16,000 had returned. This was largely because of fears about the extent to which the area is still contaminated, which has led to criticism from some nuclear proponents as ‘radiophobia’ holding back resettlement.
Warranted radiophobia
Contrary to the radiophobia accusations, people’s fear of returning to areas which are still radioactive don’t seem unreasonable when you consider how generous is the measure of when an area counts as decontaminated. For an area to be declared decontaminated, only 15% of the land has to have been cleared of excess radiation. The remaining 85% could still be significantly harmful to health, and in some areas, the level of contamination remains considerable. Bass describes how a mushroom picked on his visit to Fukushima in 2022 measured at about nine hundred times the legal limit for radiation in food in Japan (p.66). This was from an area deemed suitable for reoccupation, so when Bass points out that seven villages near to the Fukushima plant are still considered too radioactive for human habitation, this makes clear how high the levels of contamination must be.
Bass’s account of how people who have returned to Fukushima have been rebuilding lives and communities in the continuing shadow of the disaster is in many ways heartening. It shows the resiliency of people working together in even the most difficult circumstances. However, a future where we have to learn to use portable radiation detectors as part of our daily lives is not an enticing prospect. The bravery and imagination that the people of Fukushima have shown in dealing with a nuclear disaster does not negate the lesson that it would still be better to avoid such disasters in the first place.
As Bass outlines, the task of cleaning up from a significant nuclear disaster is a difficult one. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the company which ran the Fukushima plant, claims that it will have decommissioned the damaged reactors in forty years, but it has no real idea of how it will manage this (p.53). The furore over Japan’s 2023 release of contaminated water from Fukushima into the Pacific showed that their general approach is to deny that there are problems rather than to try to solve them. In the case of the water release, as Bass shows, there is good reason to think that this is not safe and risks significant contamination of marine ecosystems. It is probably true though that they simply did not know what else to do with the water.
The Japanese government is going to considerable efforts to portray Fukushima as an incident now safely in the past, symbolised by the opening of a museum commemorating the disaster in September 2020. Nevertheless, it is clear that serious issues remain, not just of clearing up from previous contamination but of the ongoing risk of further disaster. Bass points out that Units 1 and 2 at the plant are still in a dangerous condition, with spent fuel pools containing atomic material on their damaged and decaying roofs. If these were to collapse and catch fire, not at all beyond the bounds of possibility, it would be the most serious nuclear accident the world has ever seen.
Tepco’s failure to manage the risks in the clean-up after the disaster reflects how it managed the Fukushima plant when it was operational. The Japanese government’s official reports into Fukushima have all concluded that the disaster was both foreseeable and preventable if Tepco had taken fairly simple measures like installing waterproof doors and emergency power. That report concluded that Tepco were able to get away with their long history of faking safety reports and avoiding repairs because the obedience and deference ingrained in Japanese culture meant that staff at Tepco and the regulators did not speak up about what was going on. It was, in other words, a specifically Japanese accident.
Industry-wide dangers
The conclusion that the Fukushima disaster was ‘Made in Japan’ ignores the extent to which the overly cosy relationship between the regulators and the regulated in the Japanese nuclear industry is typical of the way that privatised industries work throughout the Western world. That, at the height of the disaster, Tepco intended simply to walk away and let the power plant melt down and burn (p.53), seems a particularly stark demonstration of the reality of private-public partnerships where the private company takes the profits and the public shoulders the risks.
Labelling Fukushima as a failure of Japanese culture in particular is presumably at least partially intended to imply that it has limited lessons for nuclear power elsewhere. In fact, the disaster at Fukushima is particularly important for discussions about the general safety of nuclear power precisely because it is generalisable. This was not an accident from the nuclear industry’s past, like Mayak or Windscale, or one arising from outdated reactor designs, like Chernobyl. There is no basis for thinking that nuclear power in the UK, Europe or the U.S. is going to be any safer than it has proved to be in Japan. Bass quotes the head of Japan’s major electric power company on the country’s adoption of nuclear power, when he called it ‘a deal with the devil. He bet that an advanced industrial country could manage the risks. His bet proved wrong’ (p.155).
Bass is clear that, despite the claims of the nuclear industry, new reactor designs are unlikely to address the dangers of nuclear power, not least because these are largely not new. Designs for ‘advanced’ small modular reactors (SMRs) such as the sodium-cooled reactors proposed by Bill Gates among others, and high-temperature gas and molten salt reactors, have all existed since the 1950s, when they were built and run ‘until they caught on fire, melted down, exploded or otherwise revealed … design flaws’ (p.30). The large, water-cooled nuclear plants in use today, including at Fukushima, have become the default design because the alternatives could not be made to work safely. The evidence that a new generation of nuclear power stations will have answers to safety concerns is less than convincing.
Nuclear disasters are often referred to as accidents, but as Bass points out, this is not an accurate way to look at the ‘predictable and inevitable’ consequences of nuclear technology. ‘They are not accidents. They are political decisions with disastrous results’ (p.161). Part of these political decisions is the commitment to nuclear weapons, without which nuclear power plants would not exist, and which are a significant source of radioactive contamination. When the Japanese government claims that the level of background radiation in Fukushima prefecture is no higher than that of New York or Shanghai, it is ignoring not only numerous qualifiers that make this a less reassuring statement than it sounds, but also the fact that those New York and Shanghai levels include the radiation from the 2,056 nuclear weapons detonated around the world since 1945. The background radiation we are all experiencing as a result is far from natural or benign.
Nationalise energy
Supporters of nuclear energy argue that it is the only way of supplying our energy needs without burning fossil fuels. ‘“The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow,” they say’ (p.11). Bass quotes physicist Doyne Farmer’s dismissal of those who claim that it would be impossible to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power with renewables: ‘The world is full of idiots’ (p.12). Farmer cites advances in green hydrogen, electrolyzer plants and long-term batteries as ways in which renewables could supply that consistent, baseload power for which we’re told we need new generation nuclear.
In places, though, Bass slips into dismissing the aim of cheap, abundant power along with nuclear power as the means of delivering it. He quotes historian Naomi Oreskes, for example, criticising nuclear power as ‘part of an ideology of material plenty and abundance … fuel[ing] a world in which consumption is a good thing’ (p.xvi). This is a problem, as is Bass’s closing description of nuclear power as ‘the Promethean addiction, the hypnotic focus of modern life’ (p.160). Both of these statements locate nuclear power as part of consumer capitalism, something that governments provide because we, the people, are foolishly attached to the idea of cheap energy rather than embracing restraint and low-energy lifestyles. However, the history of the development of nuclear technology shows that consumer demand played a minimal part in getting us to where we are today. The addiction is the inherent tendency within capitalism to imperialism and to war between capitalist powers, not ordinary people wanting to be able to turn the light on and still afford to pay the electricity bill.
Abundant, cheap energy which doesn’t worsen the climate crisis would be a good thing. Both supporters and opponents of nuclear power have the tendency to imply that nuclear power is the only way of achieving this, and therefore that our choices are to embrace a future of either ‘a day-care center full of radiation maps and equipment for monitoring our contaminated Earth’ (p.153) or a lot of shivering in the dark. This is not a binary that we should accept.
The progressive case for nuclear power implies that the price of energy is determined by the technology used to produce it. This is a common belief; in the same way, it has become commonplace to present renewable energy as inherently more expensive than fossil-fuel or nuclear power, when, say, you’re trying to weasel out of your commitment to remove fossil fuels from UK electricity generation by 2030. It is however not correct. The price of renewably generated power is a political choice, about the structure of the electricity market and the way that those renewables are left to be delivered by private companies.2 There is nothing inherent to the nature of generating electricity from wind or solar power which means that it has to be more expensive to the end user than electricity generated in a nuclear reactor.
We can have enough electricity for everyone’s needs by using renewables; we just can’t have it within the market system. Nuclear appears to be a way of keeping the market happy while providing a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels. As is often the case, however, and as Bass shows, the price of this compromise with market forces is too high. To get the clean, cheap, abundant energy we need, there are no shortcuts to fighting for full nationalisation of our energy infrastructure. It is the only way.
Notes:
1. M V Ramana, Nuclear is not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change (London: Verso, 2024), p.40.
2. As explained by Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet (London: Verso, 2024).