By John LaForge
Bailed-out Again, Operator Still Flailing
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco) — whose reactors went into catastrophic triple meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in 2011 — has taken another major financial blow. In January, it reported a “substantial extraordinary loss” $5.7 billion for 2025, “due to newly anticipated expenses” covering disaster response, according to the financial investment service TipRanks.
Tepco was effectively nationalized following the meltdowns and the disaster’s major releases of radioactive gases and liquids. The company was bailed out by a government infusion of $12.5 billion in 2012.
Costs are still skyrocketing as the 15-year-long and ongoing process of recovery, decontamination, and radiation dispersal work continues. (The company continues to pump radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean after used to cool the reactors’ wreckage.) The latest financial hit comes from exploding costs of developing and testing never-before-used methods of analyzing, grasping, and possibly removing roughly 880 tonnes of melted reactor fuel from below the three rubblized, explosion-destroyed reactor buildings.
The melted fuel still lost under the reactors consists of a mix of ferociously hot, radioactive, and unapproachable uranium and plutonium debris. While most reactors run on uranium fuel alone, Unit 3 at Fukushima also used plutonium, the most toxic material known to science.
Additionally, Tepco’s “financials remain heavily influenced” by disaster damage compensation costs, reported TipRanks. The company won government approval of a secondary bailout to cover a recent $443 million increase in its required compensation payments to relocated families.
Radioactive Contamination Persists
Because forests in the region were hard hit by radioactive fallout from the out-of-control reactors in 2011, some of the contamination persists. Residential areas, school yards, parks, and some farm land had tons of contaminated topsoil scraped up, bagged up, and removed. According to the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection’s report, “Environmental impact of the Fukushima accident: Radiological situation in Japan,” “Huge quantities of [cesium-137] contaminated soil (around 20 million cubic meters in total), primarily from the decontamination of gardens [and school yards], as well as organic waste such as leaves and branches were stored temporarily in situ in plastic bags.”
However, forests remain widely contaminated. According to the Journal of Radiation Research, forest areas cover 68-70% of Fukushima Prefecture, and the forests accumulated 72% of the air borne cesium-137 that fell in the . The radioactive, gamma-ray emitting cesium-137 persists in the environment for 300 years.
Under a federal law adopted after the disaster began, Tepco must decontaminate and restore affected areas to their pre-accident state, but the law left contamination in forests and other areas outside of its clean-up mandate.
The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity has reported that because the radioactivity can remain stored in forest canopies, in vegetative litter on the ground, or in the soil, rainfall can re-suspend cesium-137 (and other radioisotopes), carry it downhill, and “contaminate downstream areas, even areas that did not receive fallout or may have been decontaminated” — areas including creeks, streams, and rivers, farm lands, ditches, gutters, and storm drains.
Tetsuji Imanaka, a nuclear engineering specialist at Kyoto University, wrote for Kyodo News March 27 that the government should create hazard maps showing compliance with these standards and provide the maps to residents as a basis for decision-making to avoid unnecessary exposure.
Thousands Rally in Tokyo Against Re-start of Old Power Reactors
More than 8,000 people took to Tokyo’s streets on Saturday March 7 protesting the government’s push to restart aging nuclear reactors, demanding it and Tepco address ongoing problems of lingering contamination, resettlement of evacuees, and compensation claims.
“It’s been 15 years … and there’s still no clear plan for how to resolve these issues. I find this extremely dangerous and frightening,” said one protester, according to China’s online news source BastillePost.
“I don’t think the government or Tepco have any real intention to solve these problems. Actually, there’s no long-term plan at all. Yet they talk about restarting and even building new nuclear plants. It’s utterly absurd,” said another participant. “Now my wife and I live together in Chiba [174 miles away from home]. We only return to our hometown once or twice a year. It’s basically impossible to go back.”
About 26,000 people were still living as evacuees as of February.
Film: “Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare”
Lee Clark Zumpe reviewed the new Fukushima documentary that highlights heroes, and criticizes corporate blunders for Tampa Bay, Florida newspapers, and wrote in part:
“The HBO original documentary ‘Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare,’ details the disaster timeline while bringing to light the individuals who worked selflessly to try to minimize the threat to surrounding communities. It is a distressing yet imperative depiction of a catastrophe. The film is directed by both James Jones — the award-winning documentarian who directed ‘Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes’ — and Megumi Inman.
“Though only 90 minutes long, ‘Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare’ moves at a… slow pace, highlighting the mounting pressures the plant’s workers faced. The film captures the atmosphere of anxiety and fear, but it also unabashedly praises the commitment of the workers who fought courageously” to restore offsite power, and to patch up emergency cooling water delivery. “The directors also include commentary that shows Tepco was unprepared to deal with a disaster of [such] magnitude and that its failure to respond appropriately in the first few days likely exacerbated the grim situation.”
Book: Return to Fukushima
Return to Fukushima (OR Books, 2024) by Thomas Bass, a professor of English and journalism at the State Univ. of New York in Albany, is the best, most easily read chronicle of the disaster and its aftermath. Professor Amory Lovins of Stanford says, “Return to Fukushima clearly, calmly, and crisply describes this vast nuclear, social, and environmental disaster, its preventable causes, its continuing misrepresentation.” Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear writes, “Bass brings poetic prose, incisive analysis, and a deeply ethical lens to a subject often buried under technical jargon and political spin.” Bass’s short text (196 pages) is a must-read for anyone interested in knowing the causes and effects of the world’s worst industrial accident and the worst radioactive contamination of the ocean in history.
For a boiled-down, magazine-length consideration, see Bass’s article “Fukushima at 15: Living with radioactive hot spots and stigma as Japan’s government pushes for more reactors,” in the March 9 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where he writes: “The world’s worst industrial accident took place in an advanced industrial country with 54 nuclear reactors, supplying a third of Japan’s electricity. The final bill for containing the destroyed reactors, storing the waste, and rebuilding parts of the nuclear exclusion zone could [be] over $1 trillion. This is one quarter of Japan’s annual economy.”
