Can Fukushima Ever Recover?

Uranium (Nuclear Minerals) / Nuclear Power - Economics, Design, & Industry

Dr. Conca opines that indeed it can! While most people think the difficult issue is radiation, the real issue is infrastructure. The 50-foot tsunami that crashed into Japanese east coast five years ago destroyed the infrastructure of over 500,000 people. In addition to about 300,000 tsunami evacuees whose homes were destroyed, 150,000 additional people were ordered to evacuate from within 20 kilometers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, even though their homes were intact. While this was completely effective in preventing any radiation-induced health-effects, it caused about 1,000 deaths in its own right of moving older people, plus the most prevalent health and social effects of all ... stress, depression and fear. Dr. Yasuo Onishi, Emeritus from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington has been deeply involved with the response and recovery at Fukushima since the day it occurred.

Using technology developed in the 1990s to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of nuclear explosions, PNNL was the first organization to detect low levels of radioactivity in aerosol samples high in the atmosphere. The Japanese government sees Hanford as the U.S. closest thing to Fukushima in terms of clean-up, although Hanford was contaminated by activities on nuclear weapons production, not energy, and was much more contaminated and more complicated than Fukushima. Onishi sees the Fukushima recovery as a 3-legged stool: 1) clean-up of radioactive materials in the areas in which these materials were deposited, 2) caring for the emotional and mental health of the people so they can move back to their homes, 3) rebuilding lost infrastructure that was destroyed by tsunami and replacing with a high-tech infrastructure for a new economic future. While the nearby Fukushima Daiini Nuclear Plants will restart, the lost Daiichi nuclear capacity will be replaced by a combination of natural gas, coal, some wind, all at a much greater cost of electricity.

Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/16/can-fukushima-ever-recover/#52e7f97b6743