10 years on

Does it feel like 10 years since the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster?   I suppose it does.

I did not realise until I saw Foreign Correspondent last week the extent to which Japan is seeking to prevent a repeat of the same damage by building huge sea walls.  (By the way, that series continues to be brilliant this season - I have such admiration for the journalists who work on it, and the ABC for funding it.)    

I see that there are several stories going around that the nuclear accident didn't cause an increase in cancer.  There is the argument that the evacuation itself caused more deaths via stress and reduced care for the elderly, etc;  but this always strikes me as a "that's easy to say in hindsight" argument; one not so easy to take into account when the radiation risk is invisible and silent and drifting around according to wind strength and direction at the time.   Also, it strikes me as a bit of rhetorical to play down the the cost of clean up to prevent contamination causing cancer in future - and the natural reluctance of people (especially parents) to return to areas where they are nervous as to whether the soil really is safe.

The economic cost of the disaster, particularly the nuclear clean up, is huge:

I will look for more interesting stories to add...

Update:  from The Economist, I get the diagram I was hoping for, showing the (not insignificantly sized) area that is still not safe to return to:

 Also from the article, these points:

Kowata Masumi’s husband’s family had lived for more than 200 years in the same house in Okuma, one of the two towns next to the plant, growing persimmons, weaving silk and brewing sake. It is now in the “difficult-to-return” zone (see map), subject to 50 times more radiation than is typically considered safe. Former residents are allowed to make short visits in protective gear, but not to stay overnight. Ms Kowata, one of Okuma’s town councillors, found a monkey in her living room on one such trip, “wearing our clothes like the king of the house”....

In Fukushima prefecture 2,317 people died as a result of it, mostly because of disruption to medical care or suicide. That is more than the 1,606 who perished during the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown themselves. Some researchers argue the government should not have ordered a large-scale evacuation at all, or should have limited it to weeks rather than years.Yet it would have been hard to tell a fearful population, faced with the invisible threat of radiation, to stay put or return quickly. The meltdown destroyed confidence in experts. The lack of candour from officials in the early weeks and months after the disaster sapped trust in the authorities, pushing citizens to fill the gaps themselves. “There were so many things that weren’t convincing, so we decided to get our own data,” says Kobayashi Tomoko, an inn-owner and radiation monitor from Minamisoma, a city north of the plant. Even when the government lifted evacuation orders years later, putting an end to compensation payments for residents of those areas, some protested against what they saw as a ploy to force people to return under unsafe conditions. “Sensitivity to radioactivity depends on mindset, it’s difficult to treat as matter of policy,” says Iio Jun of the Reconstruction Design Council, a government advisory panel set up after the disaster.  ....

Many of those ordered to evacuate in the aftermath of the disaster, as well as others who fled the region of their own accord, have stayed away. In the areas where evacuation was ordered, only a quarter or so of the population has returned, mostly the elderly. As elsewhere in rural Japan, the prefecture’s population had been falling anyway, dipping by an average of 100,000 people in the nine years preceding the disaster. But 3/11 has accelerated the decline: in the nine years since, the population has fallen by an average of 180,000 a year (see chart 1)...

The enduring mistrust extends to nuclear power in general. Before 3/11 more than two-thirds of Japanese wanted to preserve or even expand it. The government wanted nuclear plants to generate half of Japan’s power by the middle of the century. A majority is now against it, including bigwigs such as Koizumi Junichiro, a former prime minister from the LDP, and Kan Naoto, who was prime minister at the time of the disaster. “I had supposed Japanese engineers were very high quality. I thought it was unlikely that human error could cause an accident in Japan,” says Mr Kan. “My thinking changed 180 degrees.”

 There is a lot more in the article, about the future of nuclear in the country.  Worth registering an account to read it for free. 

Update 2:  many astounding before and after slider pictures to be found here, at the Guardian.