Summary
Highlights
On March 11, a massive earthquake, the most powerful recorded in Japan, struck. Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant workers, initially calm due to the plant's earthquake-resistant design, soon faced a dire situation. The subsequent tsunami, twice the height of the plant's seawall, destroyed backup generators located in basements, rendering cooling systems inoperable and leading to inevitable meltdowns.
With all power lost, engineers frantically tried to keep the nuclear fuel from melting. They improvised by scavenging car batteries to power monitoring instruments. When the pressure gauge for Reactor One came back online, it revealed rapidly rising pressure, indicating a dangerous buildup of radioactive steam and hydrogen. TEPCO sought permission from the Prime Minister to vent radioactive gases to prevent an explosion, a decision fraught with historical sensitivity due to Japan's past with atomic bombs.
TEPCO faced a critical challenge: they had no electricity to open the venting valves, a situation they had never anticipated. Manual operation was difficult and dangerous amidst rising radiation. The Prime Minister, suspecting TEPCO was withholding information, traveled to Fukushima to personally insist on the venting. Plant manager Masao Yoshida, realizing the fatal radiation levels, prepared to send a 'suicide squad' if necessary.
Venting was delayed until surrounding villages could be evacuated. Norio Kimura, a local farmer searching for his missing family, was urged to leave for his surviving daughter's safety. Just after 9 AM on March 12, with evacuations complete, TEPCO ordered a team of volunteers, aware of the radiation exposure, to manually open the vents. They worked in extreme conditions, limited to 17-minute shifts, successfully releasing pressure and averting an immediate catastrophic explosion.
Just as workers felt the worst was over, a hydrogen explosion rocked Reactor One. The engineers initially feared a core explosion but later determined it was a hydrogen blast in the building's roof, leaving the core intact. However, efforts to cool the reactors were set back. The government expanded the evacuation zone to 12 miles as a plume of radiation drifted across Japan. Reactor Three also entered meltdown, prompting a specialist team of soldiers to be dispatched.
Colonel Shinji Iwakuma's team attempted to inject water into Reactor Three, but another hydrogen explosion occurred, forcing them to retreat amidst lethal radioactive debris. Plant radiation levels reached deadly highs, causing despair among workers. TEPCO allegedly considered withdrawing all personnel, a move the Prime Minister fiercely opposed during an urgent meeting at TEPCO headquarters, preventing a complete abandonment of the plant.
TEPCO evacuated most staff, leaving a skeleton crew, the 'Fukushima Fifty,' locked in the central control room amidst ridiculously high radiation levels. American nuclear specialists, frustrated by limited information, flew surveillance drones over the plant, revealing damaged spent fuel pools which, if boiled dry, could cause even worse contamination. The US advised its citizens to stay 50 miles from the plant, far exceeding Japan's 12-mile evacuation zone.
Japan's Prime Minister ordered desperate aerial water drops on the spent fuel pools. Pilots, aware of Chernobyl's casualties, undertook the perilous mission, flying close to the reactors despite high radiation. When this proved insufficient, a team of Tokyo firefighters volunteered, prioritizing older members (over 40) for the mission. They faced extreme conditions, laying hoses by hand through tsunami debris and dangerous radiation, successfully beginning to cool a fuel pool.
As radiation levels temporarily fell, hundreds of workers rushed into the plant to lay pipes for a continuous water flow to the reactor cores. Despite lacking individual dosimeters and facing high radiation, they worked quickly and collectively, bringing the most dangerous phase of the crisis to an end. The Prime Minister later resigned, and TEPCO faced billions in damages. While no workers died from immediate radiation exposure, over a hundred received doses increasing their cancer risk.
The Fukushima meltdowns contaminated hundreds of square miles, displacing over 100,000 people. Norio Kimura moved his surviving daughter across the country for safety. He returned months later to the exclusion zone, now a desolate landscape of abandoned homes and starving animals, some areas uninhabitable for decades. He attended a ceremony for tsunami victims, delivering a poignant farewell to his missing youngest daughter and promising to one day return home.