Category: Japan

Fukushima Daiichi workers boarding a bus to take them to the damaged nuclear plant. The workers are housed in a village where, they said, there was little to do. NARAHA, Japan — “Out of work? Nowhere to live? Nowhere to go? Nothing to eat?” the online ad reads. “Come to Fukushima.” That grim posting targeting the destitute, by a company seeking laborers for the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, is one of the starkest indications yet of an increasingly troubled search for workers willing to carry out the hazardous decommissioning at the site. The plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco, has been shifting its attention away, leaving the complex cleanup to an often badly managed, poorly trained, demoralized and sometimes unskilled work force that has made some dangerous missteps. At the same time, the company is pouring its resources into another plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, that it […]

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In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Michio Aoyama’s initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident. Two months later, as Mr. Aoyama prepared to publish his findings in a short, nonpeer-reviewed article for Nature, the director general of the institute called with an unusual demand — that Mr. Aoyama remove his own name from the paper. “He said there were points he didn’t understand, or want to understand,” the researcher recalled. […]

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Members of the media and Tokyo Electric Power Co. employees visit a control room at Fukushima Daiichi on March 10. Japan’s nuclear regulator said Thursday it would start wrapping up safety compliance screening of two reactors in southwestern Japan. TOKYO—Japan’s nuclear power regulator has chosen two reactors in southwestern Japan as the first candidates for being restarted under new regulations meant to prevent another disaster like the one at Fukushima in 2011. At its weekly board meeting Thursday, the Nuclear Regulation Authority selected Co. ‘s Sendai No. 1 and 2 reactors as the first on which it will aim to complete its screening process, with most major safety concerns having been cleared up during the past eight months of discussions. "There are still a few issues at Sendai. Please make sure they are solved before completion of the screening report," NRA chairman Shunichi Tanaka told fellow commissioners at the […]

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On a routine day at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear-power plant, a snakelike robot is cleaning the floor of the reactor buildings while another maps radiation density with a 3-D camera. In the three years since several of the plant’s reactors suffered meltdowns caused by Japan’s March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, it has become clear that melted fuel rods and debris inside the reactor buildings have to be cleaned up before the risks of radioactive discharge from the site can be contained. That’s where the robots come in. Robots are crucial in the cleanup, but that doesn’t mean they are […]

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