The powerful Typhoon Hagibis crashed its way through eastern Honshu in recent days, unleashing a tropical fury not seen in decades. The center of the storm passed near Fukushima Daiichi, where an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 caused a catastrophic nuclear meltdown at several reactors, prompting mass evacuations around the site.
The storm caused extensive flooding as hundreds of rivers burst their banks, causing the death toll on Wednesday to rise to 74. The Tamura city government told the Japanese daily paper Asahi Shimbun that 2,667 bags of yard debris collected around the Fukushima site - mostly sticks, grass and leaves - had been swept away by the swollen Furumichi River. Officials later told Japanese TV station NHK that only six of the bags had been found.
Bags of #debris from #Fukushima #disaster swept away in #typhoon：The Asahi Shimbun #radioactive https://t.co/3q5Sy8DiQF
— Asahi Shimbun AJW (@AJWasahi) October 14, 2019
Kevin Kamps, the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at the organization Beyond Nuclear, joined Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear Wednesday.
“Typhoons regularly hit Japan kind of like hurricanes hit the United States all too often,” he said, noting “there have been instances like this in the past.”
“It looks like some of these bags got washed out to sea. And of course, the authorities say, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal, even if the bags break open, it’s no big deal.’ So it begs the question: so why did you gather that stuff up in the first place, if it’s no big deal?’ This is radioactively contaminated material. It’s unfortunate, but it’s kind of a lingering after-impact of the catastrophe.”
“There’s all of these shoes that can drop at the Fukushima Daiichi site, and here we are, going on, what is it, nine years after the catastrophe began? But that’s the nature of nuclear power catastrophes: they have a start date, they don’t have an end date, and there’s so many things that can go wrong in a very big way at any given time.”
Kamps noted the position of both the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) as well as the national government in Tokyo was that dumping that highly radioactive wastewater into the ocean was also part of their proposed solution to the problem of its continued accumulation. The site is expected to hit maximum capacity in 2022, and the by-then 1.37 million tons of rainwater and groundwater, made radioactive by exposure to the plant’s melted-down nuclear reactors, will need to be either disposed of or treated to be made safer.
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