Twelve years already. Japan on Saturday marks the twelfth anniversary of the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, when one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded caused a deadly tsunami, leading to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. These events left nearly 18,500 dead or missing.

As every year, a minute of silence was observed in the country at 14:46. The time when, 12 years earlier, an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 shook the entire archipelago. The cores of three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had melted, forcing tens of thousands of people to be evacuated.



More than 1,650 km2 of Fukushima prefecture had been closed in the months following the disaster. Since then, intense decontamination work has reduced these uninhabitable areas to 337 km2.

What about contaminated water?

In mid-January, the Japanese judiciary confirmed the acquittal of three former officials of Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima plant - the only natural persons to be tried in criminal proceedings in connection with this disaster. They were found not guilty of negligence for the 2011 accident.

#Fukushima | The magnitude 9 earthquake, which occurred on March 11, 2011 80 km east of the island of Honshu in #Japon, and the subsequent tsunami severely affected the Tohoku region, with major consequences for people and infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/vCudqc9bWT

— France Firefighters (@PompiersFR) March 11, 2023

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The decontamination and dismantling of the plant is expected to take several more decades. One of the critical points is the management of more than one million tons of contaminated water accumulated at the plant site, from rain, groundwater and injections needed to cool the reactor cores.

This water was treated but tritium, a radionuclide that is dangerous to humans only at very high concentrated doses, could not be removed. The Japanese government has reconfirmed that it intends to start this year the very gradual discharge of this water into the Pacific Ocean. The controversial project has received favourable opinions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Japan's nuclear regulator.

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