Chapter One
Meltdown

JAPAN’S NARROW ISLAND chain lies along an active geological fault line where two of the earth’s tectonic plates collide. The circum-Pacific seismic belt, called the ‘Ring of Fire’, is highly prone to earthquakes. Particularly vulnerable is Japan’s eastern seaboard, which slopes down into a very deep trench dominated by two currents, Kuroshio and Oyashio. The Oyashio Current flows south from Okhotsk and the Kuril Islands, past Hokkaido, and along Japan’s eastern flank. Cold and rich in marine life, it has for centuries supplied the Japanese people with food.

Tōhoku, the north-eastern region of Honshu, is a quiet part of Japan, less familiar to foreign visitors than are the megacities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe. Its mountains and forests are rugged and beautiful, dotted with resorts positioned around hot springs and ski slopes. Its climate is hot and humid in summer, bitterly cold in winter. Short, fast-flowing rivers pour out of the steep gorges to reach the sea along an irregular coastline. The narrow and heavily indented flatlands of Miyagi and Fukushima, two of the region’s six prefectures, face eastwards towards the Pacific Ocean, and are carpeted in a geometric pattern of rice paddies and orchards. Tōhoku’s rice wine is savoured by connoisseurs. Its high-grade beef is claimed to be better than that from Kobe, and comes from animals with individual certificates of pedigree. Its poultry, fish, and miso (bean paste) are prized by Japanese tourists as omiyage — souvenir gifts from places to which they have travelled. Its peaches, apples, pears, cherries, plums, apricots, chestnuts, persimmons, and grapes are renowned as the most luscious in Japan. The prefecture of Fukushima provides the markets of Sendai and the Tokyo-Yokohama region with 20 per cent of their rice and almost as much of their fruit and vegetables. Or at least it did until the day that soon came to be called ‘Japan’s 3/11’.

Friday 11 March 2011 was calm in Tōhoku, slightly overcast and bitterly cold, for spring had not yet arrived. People went about their routine business: some working in sake breweries and food-processing factories; some in small- and medium-scale industrial plants producing semiconductors, optics, and car parts; some in factories making traditional lacquerware, pottery, and textiles; others shopping for the evening meal or engaged in household chores. As the afternoon sun slid towards the mountain rim to the west, primary-school children began filing in neat lines out of their classrooms, to wait for their mothers, to go to their juku cram-schools, or to catch afternoon buses home.

Without warning, at 2.46 p.m., a massive earthquake jolted the Pacific Ocean seabed 66 kilometres east of Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture. For more than ten minutes, tall buildings swayed like bamboo. Severe shocks were felt as far away as Tokyo and the west coast of Honshu. Long inured against panic, and unaware that this was an unprecedented force-nine earthquake — a dai jishin — most people in the region waited out the tremors with a combination of apprehension and stoicism.

According to recordings at the Space Science Institute of the National Central University in Taiwan, the earthquake was so powerful that it rattled the ionosphere 350 kilometres above the planet, disrupted navigational signals above its epicentre, and caused a disk-shaped wave seven minutes after the event. The only other earthquake known to have done this was the magnitude 9.3 Sumatran earthquake of December 2004.

Within 40 minutes of the new earthquake, an event occurred for which Tōhoku residents were less prepared. The earthquake had generated two massive oceanic upheavals which merged into a single gigantic swell, a ‘double tsunami’, that travelled west towards the Japanese coast at around 10 kilometres per minute — about the speed of a passenger jet when cruising. Packing an estimated 10 billion tonnes of water, the tsunami slowed to 4 kilometres per minute as it reached shallow water, and crashed as an immense wall of black water onto the coastline of Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures. A team of researchers, headed by University of Tokyo professor Shinji Sato, and the Fukushima prefectural government later concluded that the height of the wave had been 21.1 metres when it struck the Kobama district of Tomioka, just south of the Fukushima reactors. It varied in height at other coastal points — 16.5 metres at Futaba, 15.5 metres at Namie, and 12.2 metres at Minamisōma and Okuma. At all points, protective concrete walls were swept aside by its momentum as if they were doorstops. A Japanese television crew in the area managed to film fishing boats being rammed under bridges, rice paddies flooding, and long rows of vegetable-growing vinyl hothouses buried under liquid mud. The footage was broadcast over and over to appalled Japanese and international viewers.

Soon to follow were accounts of the horrendous human damage as entire towns and factories were flattened, villages washed away, and cars, buses, ferries, and trains engulfed in seawater, mud, and detritus. The tsunami acted like a battering ram, gathering weight and bulk from the thousands of buildings, motor vehicles, and boats that it carried before it. Its impetus took it several kilometres inland, further than any reasonable prediction would have suggested. Thousands of men, women, and children were carried inland, to be crushed against buildings and cliffs, or swept back out to sea to drown in the wave’s reflux. By the end of March, 15,413 were counted as dead, and 8069 missing. Further deaths occurred among the tens of thousands of refugees, many of them old, most dying of hypothermia in the bitterly cold weather as they battled to survive in darkened schoolrooms and other temporary shelters, cut off from food and warmth.

To make things worse, the people then had to cope with a third calamity, the malfunction of a nuclear-power complex on the coast slightly south-east of Fukushima city.

Owned and run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), what was then a smartly painted pale-blue and white facility is known as Fukushima Dai-ichi (Fukushima Number One). Built on the flat, seaside site of a Pacific War Japanese air base, it comprises six reactors and associated equipment in a sprawling complex of around four hectares. The oldest reactor, Unit One, is a General Electric–designed Mark I boiling-water reactor (BWR) of 439 megawatts (MW), operating since its construction in 1971. Units Two, Three, and Four are 760 MW BWRs, operating since 1974. Five and Six are larger capacity BWRs again, brought online after completion towards the end of the 1970s. General Electric designed all of the units, and built units One, Two, and Six. Toshiba built units Three and Five, and Hitachi built Unit Four. According to GE’s website prior to the accident, all reactors met the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the area where they were sited.

The Fukushima reactors are almost identical in design and age to many General Electric BWRs operating in the United States. In their centre is a pear-shaped steel containment building, or drywell, with a reactor pressure vessel suspended in its neck. Each vessel is an upright steel cylinder of about 7 metres in diameter and 21 metres in height, containing an average load of around 95 tonnes of nuclear fuel, comprising at least 25,000 3.6-metre-long zirconium fuel rods packed with pellets of slightly enriched uranium (3 per cent uranium-235). At the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex, Unit One is the smallest of the reactors, with about 70 tonnes of fuel-core load; Unit Six is the largest, with a 132-tonne fuel core. Before the accident, each core was cooled by a main feed line of fresh water, which circulated through the uranium rods in the vessel, heated, and exited as steam via a closed-loop primary circuit. The steam expanded to drive a high-pressure steam turbine, which was linked to an electricity generator. After passing through the turbine, the exhausted steam circulated to the wetwell, a giant doughnut-shaped seawater-cooled condensation chamber beneath the containment building, before being pumped once more as water back into the reactor vessel, where the process was repeated.

A peculiar feature of the General Electric–designed BWRs is the position of the pool of water, which holds spent fuel rods as they are rotated out of the reactor core when their thermal efficiency has been lost. In earlier GE BWRs, this pool sits high above and to one side of the reactor vessel, in a very exposed position. The designers placed it there for convenience, to allow gantries easy access to deposit their dangerous load of hot, spent fuel drawn from the adjacent open mouth of the reactor vessel. The reactor vessel, drywell containment, wetwell condensation chamber, and spent-fuel storage pool are all enclosed in a heavy concrete reactor building. On top sits a fully instrumented service floor in a lighter steel structure manned by plant operators.

Before the earthquake, units One, Two, and Three of the Dai-ichi plant were running, but units Four, Five, and Six were in cold shutdown for servicing. The fuel load of reactor four had been transferred to the water-filled spent-fuel storage pool located at the higher level of its reactor building. Time lines matter here if one is to chart the rising tide of chaos.

The earthquake at first seemed to have left the three operating reactors undamaged, as they were continually cooled by pumps powered by the regional grid. Suddenly, however, the power grid failed. A procedure known as SCRAM (see Appendix) was immediately initiated: neutron-absorbing control rods were rapidly inserted into the cores by electric motors, to halt the fission process and stop power generation. Simultaneously, emergency diesel generators, located on ground level behind the reactors, kicked in to pump fresh cooling water into the reactors. These actions kept things under control for another hour. At 3.41 p.m., however, the 21-metre-high tsunami generated by the earthquake rose out of the Pacific and struck the complex, flooding the generators. Only one battery-powered generator remained operational, but it did not have sufficient power to drive the cooling pumps, and all but one of three emergency core-cooling systems failed. A core isolation pump continued to operate, but it malfunctioned as the core temperature rose.

The situation deteriorated rapidly. As operators rushed around the control rooms in the hot, chaotic darkness, desperately trying to read instruments and decide what to do, heat from the fuel rods continued to produce steam in the reactors, which discharged into the condensation chamber beneath the reactor vessels. As heat and pressure rose, the water-coolant level in the reactors fell. The tops of the fuel rods in the reactor cores became exposed to the air. Temperature of the cladding around the rods rose to above 900 degrees Celsius. The cladding distorted and fractured, releasing fission products from the fuel rods, which were now half exposed. As the temperature rose to 1200 degrees, zirconium in the cladding began to burn. It also reacted to the water, producing zirconium oxide and releasing volatile hydrogen gas. The plant engineers were instructed to vent the steam and hydrogen from the containment building, but the venting system did not function because it depended on the same electricity sources that had failed and caused the crisis. None of the engineers had ever vented gas manually, and they had to search frantically through the dark control room to find the instruction books, and then slowly crank the vents open by hand — much too late to prevent what followed.

At 1800 degrees, the cladding and steel structures began to melt. At 2500 degrees, the fuel rods disintegrated, and radioactive debris formed inside the cores. At 2700 degrees, the fuel rods melted, releasing into the containment building a toxic stew of radioactive isotopes, including plutonium-239, uranium-235, americium, xenon, neptunium, caesium-137, iodine-131, and noble gases. Meanwhile, the hydrogen exploded sequentially in units One, Three, and Two, shattering the steel-framed concrete roofs of their reactor buildings, leading to the uncontrolled release of gases containing fission products into the atmosphere. Multiple leaks in pumps, pipes, and tanks released a similar stew of radioactivity into the sea close to the plant.

Worse was that, before the earthquake and tsunami, Unit Three had been fuelled with a trial batch of mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) containing about 230 kilograms of plutonium-239, which had been produced at the experimental nuclear complex in Rokkashō. Reprocessed from spent reactor fuel, MOX is richer in plutonium than conventional reactor fuel, and produces more radiation from plutonium-239. Sampling conducted around the complex within days of the explosions found five localities contaminated with plutonium-239, two of which were positively identified as being contaminated with plutonium from the Unit Three MOX fuel.

Meanwhile, even though shutdown and offline, Unit Four was having problems of its own. Its spent-fuel storage pool was holding 256 tonnes of spent fuel rods, 95 tonnes of which had been transferred from its reactor to the pool shortly before the earthquake. Under the lateral and vertical force of the earthquake, this heavy load had sloshed around the pool until cracks had appeared, releasing coolant (along with radiation) and raising the temperature of the rods. Another meltdown was possible. Mitsuhiko Tanaka, an engineer who helped design and supervise construction of the unit, was quoted in the Bloomberg News of 18 March 2011 as saying that the pool was damaged during the production process. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during manufacture were forgotten, and the walls became warped. This would indicate that this pool, at least, being too weak to withstand the lateral shaking from the tremors, was damaged by the earthquake, not the tsunami that later flooded the emergency generators.

TEPCO belatedly acknowledged that not all damage to the reactors was caused by the tsunami knocking out the emergency generators. They reluctantly admitted that the earthquake may have damaged the number four cooling pool, and also the high-pressure core flooder that provided emergency cooling to all of the reactor cores. Thus, even if the emergency generators had not been knocked out by the tsunami, the cores might not have been cooled properly. Both breakdowns carried safety implications concerning the supposedly ‘quake-resistant’ designs at Fukushima and all other Japanese reactors.

Back at the melted cores, Japanese emergency crews were attempting to pump in fresh water. But the heavy-lift military helicopters they used could not get low enough to dump their loads accurately because of the intensity of radiation bombarding their flight crews. Most of the water was blown away by fierce wind. They returned next morning with lead plates welded to the bellies of the choppers, but they still couldn’t get close enough, and their loads of water again dispersed before hitting the target. Fire engines from the elite Tokyo Fire Brigade made an emergency dash to the site to pump sea water into the reactors, but they were only partially successful because the crews’ vision was impeded by the height of the reactor buildings towering above them. In defiance of an order from his supervisor not to do so (because it was thought that this would destroy the reactors), one of the plant’s senior technicians ordered sea water to be pumped from jury-rigged overhead jibs on the fire engines into the reactor and spent-fuel storage pool of Unit Four. But the sea water’s cooling effects remained uncertain because salt in the water formed a crust around the hot fuel rods, insulating them from the coldness. Days passed, and these attempts either failed or were only partially successful in lowering core temperatures. TEPCO, humiliatingly, ordered in a 62-metre-long water pump from China, usually an export market for Japanese nuclear technology.

Another humiliation faced by TEPCO’s management was that they had not seen fit to acquire industrial robots designed to resist high levels of radiation and climb over mounds of rubble to work in damaged reactor buildings. This was difficult to understand in a country with world-leading robotic technology, and robots that sing and dance. But like the other nine Japanese electric-power companies, TEPCO believed its own propaganda that nuclear power was safe, and that such technology was unnecessary and would send the wrong signals to the Japanese public. Hiroyuki Yoshikawa strongly criticised this complacency. In addition to being the director-general of the Centre for Research and Development Strategy at the Japanese Science and Technology Agency, and a former president of Tokyo University, he was an engineer himself, who at one stage had invented such a nuclear emergency robot, which TEPCO had declined to purchase. Humiliatingly again, the company was belatedly forced to import robots from iRobot, a company in Bedford, Massachusetts, to deal with the crisis.

TEPCO’s arrogance and lack of foresight may well have cost the lives of a handful of brave TEPCO company volunteers who entered the damaged reactor buildings to attempt to repair pipes and pumps and generally clean things up. Wearing thin radiation-resistant suits and helmets, they had to work in rotation in ten-minute shifts to avoid fatal radiation. More than 160 retired nuclear engineers then set up a ‘skilled veterans corps’ to join them. Their spokesman, Yasuteru Yamada, 72, declared that young people, especially those who would have children in future, should not be exposed to radiation: ‘Everybody is afraid of death. So am I.’ His team would work on condition that their exposure to radiation would be strictly controlled and monitored. However, another veteran volunteer, Masahiro Ueda, 69, with almost four decades of expertise on water-cooling pumps in nuclear reactors, said he would be willing to give his life: ‘I’m old. I don’t care when I die. I want to devote the rest of my career to the restoration of the plant. Someone has to take action. You can’t work properly at nuclear plants without specialist knowledge.’ By the middle of October 2011, seven months after the tsunami, three of the emergency volunteers had died — one of a heart attack in May, the second of an acute form of leukaemia in August, and a third of undisclosed causes in October. In a statement, TEPCO aggressively asserted that the deaths had nothing to do with exposure to radiation at the plant.

All of the veterans worked in the full glare of televised publicity, and were widely seen as heroes. But even before they had gone, a vast team of around 18,000 unsung and unacknowledged workers had begun the arduous and extremely dangerous job of cleaning things up, in and around the reactors. Customarily called hiseisha’in (day labourers) in the nuclear industry, these nomads were recruited without written contracts from among the jobless in nearby towns and cities, some from as far away as the slums of Sanya, in Tokyo, and Kotobukicho, in Yokohama. Issued with dosimeters for measuring personal exposure to radiation, they were paid around ¥10,000 (AU$130) at the end of each shift. Without proper protective clothing and footwear, they were often exposed to intense radiation — but still within the raised level announced by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare on 14 March 2011 of 250 millisieverts per year (up from the previous level of 100 mSv over five years). This new level ‘legalised’ illnesses and deaths from radiation exposure at the reactors, or at least absolved the government or TEPCO of responsibility for them. As happens with such nuclear nomads, their cumulative doses of radiation were not recorded, and therefore cancers they may later develop cannot with any certitude be legally attributed to radiation exposure from their work at Fukushima.

In the days following the disaster, local media coverage on Fukushima was uneven, oscillating from blandly optimistic to deeply pessimistic. On the optimistic side were the mainstream media, part of the perfidious press-club system, which funnels information from officials through obligated journalists to the public. It locks the most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, discouraging investigation or independent analysis. As David McNeill observed in a Japan Times retrospective on 8 January 2012, it was journalists from the independent weekly magazines who sank their teeth into the cozy ranks of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players, and their media acolytes who promote nuclear power in Japan.

Initially, prime minister Naoto Kan and his Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency simply asserted that all nuclear plants in the country were safe, no radiation had been released, and utilities at Fukushima were ‘managing issues of cooling water systems’. Playing down the disaster to their captive press-club journalists, TEPCO spokesmen, in concert with chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano, coyly announced that ‘radioactive vapour’ had been released from the plant, but that the amount ‘was very small and within human tolerances’. Other unbelievable claims were that sea water being pumped into the reactors was lowering temperatures; that reported contamination of spinach from Ibaraki prefecture and milk from Fukushima was ‘at levels not harmful to human health’; and that, nine days after the tsunami, radiation levels and temperatures near the plant had successfully been reduced, and were continuing to fall.

As days stretched into weeks, official pronouncements about the situation became increasingly grim. Acting as a private citizen, the vice-chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, Tatsujiro Suzuki, poured out his hopes and concerns on Facebook in a daily summary of events, which was widely reprinted. On 21 March, chief cabinet secretary Edano placed a restriction order on distribution of green-leaf vegetables to Tokyo from Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, and Fukushima prefectures. Increasing radiation levels were detected in fruit and vegetables further and further away from the afflicted reactors. Beef cattle were also found to be irradiated. TEPCO found ‘higher than regulated’ levels of iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and cobalt-58 and -60 in sea water off the Fukushima coast. Emergency workers at the plant were reported to have suffered from radiation exposure and skin burns, but had been ‘successfully treated’ in hospital.

Conflicting evacuation advice from areas around the plant added to the alarm and confusion. After initially denying the leakage of any radiation, on 12 March Edano established a 10-kilometre compulsory-evacuation and exclusion zone around the plant, and asked people living 20 kilometres beyond that to stay indoors. On 25 March, he amended this, suggesting voluntary evacuation from anywhere within the outer 10- to 30-kilometre zone. The same day, the American embassy called on US citizens within 50 kilometres of the plant to leave the area. Adding to the confusion, high levels of radiation were discovered well outside both zones, first at the village of Iitate, 39 kilometres north-west of the plant, then at locations more than 50 kilometres away. TEPCO also announced the detection of plutonium-239 in five locations near the plant. Clutching at straws, Suzuki reported the ‘good news’ that on 30 March the lights were back on in the control room of Unit Four, and that all control rooms now had power.

As contradictory statements continued to come from officials, Suzuki’s diary became increasingly incoherent. On 4 April, TEPCO announced absurdly low radiation levels of iodine-131 near the complex, both in the sea and on land, of 0.6 millisieverts per year, 25 per cent of the annual-dose limit of 2.4 millisieverts. The next day, it announced iodine-131 and caesium-134 levels were many times the ‘regulated’ levels. Meanwhile, the Ibaraki Fisheries Association said it detected high iodine and caesium contamination in fish caught offshore near the plant. The Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare replied in a typical bureaucratic fashion that an advisory committee was being assembled to establish safety standards for radioactive contamination in fish. This did not assuage Japan’s fishing industry, now concerned that much of the highly contaminated water which had been injected and sprayed onto the reactors at the rate of millions of litres per hour was being discharged into the Pacific Ocean adjacent to the plant. In an unprecedented confrontation broadcast by Japanese television, the chairman of the national fisheries union told the chairman of TEPCO: ‘You’ve trampled on the nationwide efforts of fishery operators ... Despite our strong demand to cease the flow of contaminated water into the ocean as soon as possible, just a few hours later more water was dumped without consulting us — you pushed through. We were really ignored. We wonder if you had even heard us. This is an affront to us and a truly unforgivable act.’

On 8 April, another earthquake, of magnitude 7.4, hit the Tōhoku region. At the Rokkashō reprocessing plant and the Higashidōri nuclear power plant, north of Fukushima, external power was lost, but emergency diesel power saved the cooling capacity at both plants because there was no following tsunami to knock them out. An aftershock of magnitude 7.1 hit the Fukushima and Ibaraki area on 11 April, adding to fear, confusion, and uncertainty.

On 12 April, the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan raised the rating of Fukushima Dai-ichi from five, the same level as Three Mile Island in 1979, to seven — the maximum on the nuclear-accident scale, and the same as Chernobyl in 1986 — but claimed at the same time that the amount of radiation was only 10 per cent of Chernobyl. On 18 April, TEPCO announced that robots operating in and near the plant had measured 10–49 millisieverts per hour at Unit One and 28–57 millisieverts per hour at Unit Three, levels much too dangerous for workers.

A week later, the government changed the nature of evacuation from the 10- to 30-kilometre zone from ‘voluntary’ to ‘compulsory’. An outer diameter of a further 10 kilometres was declared a ‘voluntary’ evacuation zone. Both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been closely monitoring the situation, and recommended a minimum exclusion zone of 80 kilometres. An aerial survey of caesium-137 contamination in the Fukushima region, conducted in early April and published on the IAEA website, had shown high levels of contamination far beyond the exclusion zone. Greenpeace Japan suggested that the Japanese government’s narrower zone had been prompted by TEPCO, which did not want to face any more compensation claims than it had to.

Opinion among evacuated residents was divided. Those ignorant of or in denial about the toxicity of radiation — which they could not see, feel, touch, or smell — complained bitterly about the inconvenience, and wondered when they might return to their homes and villages. None seemed to know, or had been told, that the radiation could make their homes uninhabitable for decades. Tōhoku residents outside of the evacuation perimeter were deeply concerned about the welfare of their families. A group of women with kindergarten-age children took samples of radioactive soil from playgrounds, journeyed to Tokyo, and protested in front of the National Diet building. One mother wrote to her local Diet member stating that summer was coming on, temperatures were rising, and instead of being able to play outside, swim in the local pond, and eat peaches from trees in their orchard, her children were required to remain indoors, or go to school wearing hats and masks.

In his 1982 comic book When the Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs depicts an elderly couple in rural England trying to follow tragically unrealistic government radiation-protection instructions after a nuclear strike on Britain during the Cold War. Post-Fukushima, a Japanese comic book was published with a different but equally unrealistic message. Aimed at toddlers and their parents, it represented the stricken Fukushima reactors as men with upset tummies. While the men only farted, said the cartoon, the bad smell would do little harm. But if the men did a poo, the children and their parents would have to hide under tables and cover themselves up to avoid contact with the noxious poison.

Soon after the accident, concerns about radiation spread to Tokyo, where traces of iodine-131 and caesium-137 were discovered at a Tokyo purifying station and in 11 types of vegetables from the Tōhoku region, including broccoli, cabbage, turnips, parsley, and other green-leaf vegetables. Officials recommended against infants ingesting tap water. By 24 March, three 550 mL bottles of water were being distributed to every household in the capital where an infant was living — about 80,000 households. Warnings about water generated fears among many parents of young children in the capital. Mitsue Watanabe, 39, tried to buy purified water at several stores, but found they had sold out and did not know when they would get more. She told reporters that she still breastfed her infant, but the baby was starting to eat solids, which had to be cooked in water. Another Tokyo resident, Jinko Sato, 39 and pregnant with her third child, said she didn’t know what to do without radiation-free water to cook with. ‘What to me was something that was happening far away has all of a sudden become an immediate concern,’ she said.

By June, public anger had mounted against the government’s and TEPCO’s handling of the Fukushima accident. Rallies were held in Tokyo and other cities. One demonstration in a Tokyo square grew to 20,000, and its organiser, Hajime Matsumoto, told the crowd: ‘We know the dangers of relying on nuclear power, and it’s time to make a change. And yes, I believe Japan can change.’ Another organiser, Junichi Sato, program director of Greenpeace in Japan, thought it remarkable that such rallies were happening at all in a country that valued conformity and order. (What he didn’t say, or was perhaps too young to remember, was that huge and violent rallies had occurred in Japan in protest at the renewal of the Japan–US Security Treaty of 1960.) A farmer at the Tokyo rally, Hiromasa Fujimoto, said it was his first rally. ‘I want to tell people that I’m just so worried about the soil, about the water. I now farm with a Geiger counter in one hand, my tools in the other. It’s insane,’ he said.

Kiyoko Okoshi, a lifelong farmer and resident of Iwaki in Fukushima prefecture, began to distrust official announcements of radiation dispersal. She followed Fujimoto’s example and bought her own dosimeter to check nearby forest roads and rice paddies. What she found was startling — a nearby ditch recorded the potentially harmful level of 67 microsieverts per hour. Her actions caught on. Some mothers as far away as Tokyo bought dosimeters and began testing for contamination. When radiation specialists offered a seminar in Tokyo on using dosimeters, 250 people attended while others had to be turned away. Bureaucrats in Fukushima prefecture volunteered to clean the soil in schoolyards, guided by a radiation expert from the Ministry of Health who had quit his job over his bosses’ slow response to the nuclear accident. Such activism, observed the International Herald Tribune in August, would barely merit comment in the United States, but was exceptional in a country where people generally trust their leaders to look after them.

Concerns about Japan’s agricultural exports began to spread abroad before the end of March. In the United States, wisps of radiation from the Fukushima reactors were detected in Washington state and California. The Food and Drug Administration banned the import of dairy products, fruit, and vegetables from four prefectures — Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, and Fukushima. Japanese seafood would continue to be allowed in, but only after being screened.

Mild concern was also being expressed in Australia, Japan’s main supplier of natural uranium for its power industry. In June, under pressure from the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) conducted tests on radiation levels in 800 Toyotas and other Japanese-made vehicles loaded at Yokohama and arriving in the New South Wales steel town of Port Kembla on board the vehicle carrier Trans Future 7. The acting chief executive of ARPANSA, Professor Peter Johnston, said he expected to find radiation, but ‘not of sufficient levels as to be of concern to the public’. Warren Smith of the MUA said his union wanted testing to be expanded into other forms of cargo from Japan. A mayoral candidate from the nearby town of Wollongong, Michael Organ, expressed similar concern. ‘In the past,’ he said, ‘Wollongong has been declared a nuclear-free zone. I know, in recent years, council seems to have pulled down a lot of [nuclear-free] signs. Perhaps it’s time to bring them out again.’

A little-known fact outside Japan is that surviving victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, the hibakusha, were socially isolated in Japan for the rest of their lives. Sadly, some people outside the spreading disaster zone in Fukushima now began to suffer their own form of radiation discrimination. According to Rick Wallace in The Weekend Australian, Tokyo road-users began to ostracise drivers and passengers of cars bearing Fukushima number plates, and petrol stations denied them access to the pumps. Couriers from Fukushima were forced to transfer their parcels bound for Tokyo onto trucks with Saitama prefecture plates. An unnamed woman planning her marriage in June cancelled it rather than accept the prejudice of her future mother-in-law, who had asked, ‘What if we don’t have a healthy child because of the radiation?’ It didn’t matter that the prospective bride was living in Tokyo, no closer to the plant than most Japanese. The fact that she grew up in Fukushima was enough to attract discrimination.

Meanwhile, the local government of Tsukuba, the ‘science city’ in Ibaraki prefecture, north-east of Tokyo, was forced by the central government to apologise for compelling Fukushima refugees to obtain ‘radiation-free’ certificates or undergo screening. Children from Fukushima prefecture, temporarily resettled in Funabashi near Tokyo, came home in tears after being ostracised by schoolyard playmates, who claimed that the little refugees might ‘infect’ them. Akihiro Sugano of the Fukushima Bar Association protested at such treatment, calling on Yukio Edano to condemn it. ‘Discrimination to the Fukushima people’, he said, ‘is based on misunderstandings and prejudice, and it is an extremely serious violation of human rights. Fukushima people have suffered from a great earthquake and tsunami. And because of the nuclear power plant accident, these people are now forced to leave their home town. In the midst of such unrest, it is extremely distressing to face discriminatory treatment at a new place where they are evacuated to. It becomes more serious for the children if they are bullied or teased at school because that’s where they spend most of their time, apart from their homes.’

Emperor Akihito recognised the scale of the Fukushima disaster early. Although recovering from heart surgery, he visited the area with Empress Michiko on 16 March, and gave a televised speech from the cavernous theatre of the International Centre in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture. He called on the Japanese people to unite in the face of catastrophe and to help each other through the crisis, and he mentioned the dangers of nuclear radiation and how overcoming them was a ‘formidable task’. According to Rebecca Solnit, a writer for the London Review of Books who was there, this passage was censored by the networks when the speech was broadcast.

To some observers, the form and content of the Akihito address were similar to the unprecedented address that his father, emperor Hirohito, had broadcast to the nation after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The Australian scholar Gavan McCormack wrote in The Asia-Pacific Journal of April 2011 that, in announcing the Japanese surrender and calling on the people to unite to ‘endure the unendurable’, Hirohito was signalling a radical change in Japanese policy. Was Akihito also signalling the need for radical change — for Japan to abandon nuclear technology and switch its research efforts to less-dangerous renewable technologies?

McCormack asserted that the problem was not just the cluster of reactors in and around Fukushima, but the whole nuclear system, and the mentality that underpinned it. The Hamaoka cluster of reactors at Omaezaki, in Shizuoka prefecture near Tokyo, were built on fault lines that seismologists have long said are unstable and at least as prone to disaster. McCormack quoted seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi’s view, shared by many other earthquake experts, that the impact of a Fukushima-scale earthquake and tsunami at Hamaoka would be huge: ‘A disaster at Hamaoka will mean [US military] bases in Yokosuka, Yokota, Zama, and Atsugi will all be of no use.’ This observation about American bases resonated with a young Australian naval doctor, on board the frigate HMAS Darwin when it participated in joint naval exercises with units of the Japanese and US navies off Japan in July 2011. She said that, during the exercises, the Darwin berthed in at least one US Navy base in Japan where the entire food regime was constantly and nervously being monitored to ensure that sailors were not being contaminated.

As if heeding seismologist Ishibashi’s concern about Hamaoka, Japan’s trade and industry minister, Banri Kaieda, echoed an earlier call from prime minister Naoto Kan and called on the Chubu Electric Power Company to shut down the complex. Elliptically, however, Kaieda insisted that the government did not have the legal power to order an immediate closure: ‘People’s opinions are also important. We would like Chubu Electric Power to make a decision by taking various aspects into consideration.’ At the same time, Kaieda denied that the Japanese government would reverse its policy, which was in favour of atomic power.

Despite Kaieda’s defiant words, nuclear power in Japan may have suffered a major economic blow from the Tōhoku disaster. According to an analysis by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability on 17 March, a mere six days after the earthquake and tsunami, the three affected Fukushima reactors are not reparable and, given damage and radioactive contamination, units Four, Five, and Six may not be reparable either. Twelve other nuclear reactors — seven owned by TEPCO, four owned by the Tōhoku Electric Power Company, and one owned by the Japan Atomic Power Company — also went offline following the earthquake, and are either write-offs or will require lengthy and expensive repairs. TEPCO and Tōhoku will have to rely much more heavily on existing hydro-electric and fossil-fuel plants, probably for many years. Meanwhile, the Chubu Electric Power Company’s four reactors at Hamaoka have been shut down for an indeterminate time, subject to a review of their defences against tsunamis. Other reactors around Japan are also offline while they undergo lengthy safety-inspection procedures. Indeed, by May 2012, the entire Japanese fleet of 54 reactors had been shut down pending safety checks. And in response to deep public suspicion and concern, the construction of new reactors at several sites around the country has been suspended.

Nautilus’s best-case scenario was that damaged plants might be restarted within three years, when much of the short-term electricity shortage in the Tōhoku region and further afield might have already been eliminated, especially if new fossil-fuelled plants such as combined-cycle natural gas plants were built and completed in a few years. The institute’s worst-case scenario included a finding that all nuclear plants in the earthquake area had significant damage leading to prolonged retrofit, some coal- and gas-fired plants were damaged beyond repair, and central authorities were reluctant to approve the construction of more reactors due to the growth of public concern about nuclear dangers.

I explore such prognostications later in the book. But it can be observed here that in August 2011, Tokyo correspondent Mark Willacy told broadcaster Tony Eastley on ABC Radio National that an extraordinarily high dose rate of 10 sieverts per hour was being recorded at Fukushima Dai-ichi, a level fatal to any worker if exposed for any length of time, and two-and-a-half times previous levels measured around the plant. The reading was taken by a gamma camera at a ventilation shaft between units One and Two. Willacy was making his observations 100 kilometres north of Fukushima, in Sendai, where he said that the millions of inhabitants were trying to deal with the insidious spread of fallout.

The hundreds of tonnes of irradiated nuclear fuel stored in the spent-fuel pools in the ruins of the plant posed the greatest danger. Several pools stood exposed to the atmosphere, 30 metres above the ground. Their structures had already been weakened by the March 2011 earthquake, and if they toppled as the result of further earthquakes, they would release much more radiation. Even if this did not happen, the prognosis remained bleak. A government report, presented by Yukio Edano to local officials in Fukushima prefecture as recently as April 2012, forecast high levels of radiation, exceeding 50 millisieverts per annum, in towns near the reactors up to 2032.

In any event, I was determined to visit Japan as early as possible to get a more accurate and detailed picture of the status and future of Japan’s nuclear industry, and to judge the mood of the people. Many conflicting reports and stories needed checking out, including some intriguing assertions about the state of the Tōhoku coast. For example, a British seismologist, Roger Bilham, had undertaken an aerial survey of damage along the coast, and his story was broadcast on ABC television in Sydney on 16 August 2011. Bilham said that one of the reasons the concrete walls designed to stop tsunamis off the Fukushima reactors and elsewhere along the coast were so ineffectual was that the whole coast actually sank at least a metre as a result of the primary earthquake. He also recorded the occurrence of liquefaction that had occurred throughout the region and as far south as Tokyo — a phenomenon that causes land to liquefy into a slurry through the repeated vibrations of an earthquake, turning the ground to jelly. Bilham showed diagrams of the epicentres of hundreds of aftershocks following the 11 March quake, weakening the seaboard along the coast of Honshu as far south as Tokyo. His calm and unemotional prediction was that geological tension beneath the Pacific had increased as the result of the dai jishin, and that further mega-quakes could be expected to occur, whether in the next day or in ten years — no one could predict when. But the Tokyo region was, and is, highly vulnerable.