By John LaForge
Workers flee disaster site after tsunami scare
Japan is one of the most earthquake prone areas in the world, and the regular quakes raise traumatic memories of the March 11, 2011 record-breaker that left 19,000 dead and smashed the six-reactor Fukushima-Daiichi site. This July there were several: a magnitude 5.5 quake struck just off Japan’s southeast Tokara coast July 3; a mag. 4.2 quake hit east of Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture July 12; and a mag. 4.1 quake shook the same area July 25.
In late July, an extremely powerful 8.8-magnitude quake struck Avacha Bay in Russia’s Far East, triggering tsunami warnings and evacuations across the entire Pacific Rim. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was one of the strongest ever recorded.
The owner/operator of the wrecked reactor complex, Tokyo Electric Power Co., evacuated its entire staff of 4,000 in response to warnings of a possible nine-foot tsunami, after first halting its pumping of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific.
Elsewhere in Japan, over two million people were urged to evacuate the eastern seaboard, and a 4-foot tsunami wave did strike north of Fukushima at Iwate Prefecture, some 1,090 miles from Avacha Bay, site of the major Russian earthquake.
— Nukenet, The Independent, BBC News, July 30, 2025
China partially lifts ban on Japanese seafood imports
China “conditionally resumed” the importation of Japanese seafood products June 30, after conducting water sample inspections off the coast of the Fukushima disaster site. Beijing had banned all such imports as a protest and precaution, following Japan’s 2023 launch of its deliberate discharging of large volumes of radioactively contaminated cooling water into the Pacific Ocean. The 2023 ban was imposed to “comprehensively prevent the food safety risks of radioactive contamination caused by the discharge of nuclear wastewater from Fukushima into the sea,” China’s General Administration of Customs said then.
Chinese customs officials said June 30 the seafood import ban would continue for ten prefectures, namely Fukushima and its nine closest neighboring states. Products from other regions will need health certificates, radioactive substance detection qualification certificates, and production area certificates issued by the Japanese government for Chinese customs declarations, the government said.
Relatedly, Hong Kong announced that it will maintain its ban on Japanese seafood, sea salt, and seaweed imports from the same ten prefectures still targeted by mainland China — Fukushima, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, Saitama, Tokyo, and Chiba — citing ongoing concerns about the risks associated with the discharge of radioactive wastewater.
— NavigatorInsurance.com, July 7; BBC, June 30; Reuters, June 29, 2025; Agence France Presse, Daily Sun, Aug. 24, 2023
Tepco lost $6 billion as meltdown recovery falters
Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings corporation (Tepco), the owner and operator of the six reactors at Fukushima, lost $6.1 billion (903 billion yen) between April and June this year, overrun with the costs of inventing, designing, building, and testing robotic machines with which to remotely extract the ferociously radioactive melted reactor fuel from deep inside the earthquake and tsunami-wrecked reactors. There are a total of over 880 metric tonnes of “corium” or melted and rubblized uranium and plutonium fuel in three reactors that Tepco claims it will extract. Nikkei-Asia reported August 1 that Tepco says it has $4.7 billion “earmarked for future demolition work,” which doesn’t even cover this spring’s one-quarter loss. Tepco has said that its preparations for the extraction are “expected to take 12 to 15 years.”
The quarterly financial loss makes a mockery of announced plans by the government and Tepco to fully complete decommissioning of the rubbished reactors by 2051.
— Nikkei-Asia, July 29 and Aug. 1; The Mainichi Japan, Aug. 1, 2025
Radioactive soil placed in Prime Minister Ishiba’s office grounds, in “safety” parody
In a surreal display of political slapstick July 19th, the office of Japan’s PM Shigeru Ishiba buried on his office’s garden grounds two cubic meters of radioactive soil scraped up during Fukushima clean-up operations (in which some 14-to-20 million metric tonnes of topsoil and debris were scraped up) — “to show it is safe to reuse.”
Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported that “The radioactive cesium concentration in the soil being buried is 6,400 Becquerels per kilogram” (Bq/kg). “Becquerels” are a standard measuring unit of radioactivity. The 6,400 is below the legally permitted limit of 8,000 Bq/kg for the so-called “recycling.”
The radioactivity emitted by the soil comes from cesium-137 which was spewed in huge amounts by Fukushima’s melting and exploding reactors, and which came down as fallout. Cesium fallout still contaminates huge areas of forests and farmlands in the region.
The millions of tons of collected soil now in storage are being tested and sorted to identify material with cesium at 8,000 Bq/kg or less. Several million tons of it may then be used as fill in construction projects, road-building, and railway embankments all around Japan. Asphalt, farm soil, “or layers of other materials should be used to seal in the radioactivity,” Akira Asakawa, an Environment Ministry official with the soil project, told the Agence France Presse or AFP.
The PM’s demonstration plot is the first “reuse” of the poisoned waste, while experiments elsewhere have been halted due to public protest. The PM’s contaminated dirt was covered up with about eight inches of normal soil to provide some radiation shielding.
Any radiation exposure is unsafe, but negative effects like radiation sickness, immune disorders, or cancers caused by contact with the radioactive soil would take years or decades to appear, owing to the latency period between radiation exposure and the onset of induced health problems. The joke seems to be that since Prime Minister Ishiba hasn’t dropped dead after walking by, low-dose exposure must be harmless.
Readers may remember a very similar high-level comedy sketch performed by former President Barack Obama, who traveled to Flint, Michigan in May 2016. Drinking water supplies there had been contaminated with lead and to calm the public uproar, Obama sat before the cameras and theatrically downed a glass of water. The straight-faced routine was proof positive, and rock-solid confirmation beyond doubt of any kind whatsoever that Flint’s tap water was safe to drink. Bottom’s up!
— Nippon TV, July 23; NHK, July 19; AFP, New Straits Times, July 15; Associated Press, May 27, 2025; PBS, May 4, 2016
Disaster response to last eons
Countless dilemmas and setbacks have plagued the now 14-year-long emergency response to the triple reactor meltdown and widespread radiation releases that began March 11, 2011 at Fukushima on Japan’s northeast coast.
One of the latest stumbling blocks acknowledged by Tepco July 29 are the “unprecedented” technical complexities of finding, contacting, removing, and containerizing 880 tonnes of highly radioactive melted reactor fuel still smoldering at the bottom of three devastated reactors.
Unprecedented is the key word here, since the industry has never before had to contain such a large mass of wasted and unapproachable radioactivity. All the work of dealing with the wasted fuel must be done robotically and remotely, since the waste’s fierce radioactivity kills living things that come near.
Toyoshi Fuketa, head of a regulatory body overseeing the site, said at a press conference earlier that “The difficulty of retrieving the first handful of debris has become apparent,” the Kyodo News agency reported.
In 14 years’ time, engineers have managed to design, build, test, and rebuild a one-of-a-kind robot that finally succeeded in removing less than one gram of the meltdown waste from reactor No. 2 last year. That “success” was already three years behind schedule, “and some experts estimate that the decommissioning work could take more than a century,” CBS News and Mainichi Japan reported.
The torturously slow process has made Tepco’s early prediction of complete cleanup by 2051 (40 years’ time) appear to have been made up for PR reasons.
Tepco said July 29 that it would need another 12 to 15 years’ worth of preparation — until 2040 — “before starting the full-scale removal of melted fuel” at the No. 3 reactor. Tepco earlier claimed that “full-scale” extraction would begin four years ago, in 2021 according to the daily Asahi Shimbun August 1.
Of an estimated 880 tonnes of debris, only 0.9 gram has been recovered to date. With one million grams in a tonne, Tepco has only 879 million grams to go, and “A simple calculation based on the time since the accident suggests the removal process could take another 13.6 billion years to complete,” the Asahi Shimbun smirked.
— Mainichi Japan, Aug. 5; Asahi Shimbun, August 1; Nuclear Engineering International, July 31; UPI, CBS, AP, World Nuclear News, July 29, 2025
China’s reactor report card omits embarrassing radioactive emission info
China issues annual reports on its large nuclear power operations known as “China Nuclear Energy.” The 2024 edition, its latest, made headlines by omitting for the first time information on the routine radioactive gases and liquids released from its operating reactors.
Kyodo News reported that the omission may be a way to avoid accusations of hypocrisy since China has strenuously condemned Japan’s discharge of radioactively contaminated wastewater to the Pacific. At the same time China’s domestic reactors in 2022 reportedly “released wastewater containing tritium at levels up to nine times higher than the annual discharge limit” set by Japan’s discharge authorities.
— Kyodo News, July 17; Agence France Presse, New Straits Times, July 15, 2025
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