A view along the road- these houses were empty, a video can be seen below

In November 2015, I went to the northern areas surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This is the story about that drive.

Firstly I would like to write a bit of a background to this story.

I had to visit this area for a work related assignment as I am a consulting solar consulting engineer and part of my assignment was to check the potential viability of new solar power plants in the area about 22km to the north of the actual nuclear power plant. I know, the irony! Can someone make a meme of a solar panel rising out of the ashes of a nuclear power plant that is melting down like the phoenix rising out of the ashes?

The day

I live in Tokyo, Fukushima Prefecture is actually huge, but the site that I was travelling to was located about a 2 hour bullet train ride up to the north of Tokyo plus another 1-2 hour drive to the east. So I arose early and prepared all of my gear which included drones, cameras, and backpacks and some long pants and hiking shoes. I arrived at Fukushima station and hired a car for the day. It was still about another 1.5 hour drive over to the north of the area that has been affected by the Daiichi Power plant meltdown on 3/11. The destination was actually about 22km north of ground zero, but actually getting there meant that I had to drive through some of the marginal areas that were about 20km to the north of the power plant. If you actually check the radiation maps from safecast you can see that prolonged exposure to these areas in above normal limits. I would actually be driving through some heavier fallout areas. But I'll get to that in the article.

The drive

Fukushima is actually a beautiful city and driving out of the city into the mountain resembles normalcy. Only after driving for about 1 hour to the east did I start to notice more and more construction trucks and construction workers. The amount of the trucks coming out of the area was growing rapidly as I approached the 60 km zone. I then started to notice a lot of construction workers digging up the fields and a lot of these guys were wearing white contamination suits and masks and goggles. Meanwhile I was driving along a normal road, with normal cars and trucks. Some of the trucks had passengers with these white contamination suits on, some didn’t.

At this point little red flags started popping up into my mind. S&%- what the!* I thought to myself. What have I dragged myself into this time? With any kind of moment like that you realize that it will pass. Anyway it actually was a passing moment and I drove on. At no stage did I hit any roadblocks or actual checkpoints.

A few things that I noticed;

Solar powered geiger counters- These were positioned in periodic intervals along the road. You could read the live values of microSieverts quite easily from a distance.
Mountains and mountains of black plastic bags filled with dirt- These stretched as far as the eye could see. Basically all of these construction workers had been scraping the top 1-2m of soil of the whole environment. That is all the fields, all the farms, all the road edges and basically everywhere. That’s why there were so many trucks and workers. In the area that I drove through alone there was about maybe an estimated 1000 workers.

The site visit

I won’t elaborate too much on this aspect, other than it was another successful consulting visit and the client was really happy with my report. I guess solar power can be the pheonix. I drove back to Fukushima safely, jumped back on a bullet train and arrived back in time for dinner. I made sure to scrub my clothes!

Some of my own conclusions

What have we done? What has allowed this to happen? There exists a good book written by the investigative journalist Mark Willacy called “Fukushima- Japan’s tsunami and the inside story of the nuclear meltdowns”. I highly recommend this book and it is well worth the read. Mark is a good investigative journalist and is trying to piece together the whole situation that led up the the actual disaster and some of the interviews that he was able to get done are really legendary. To even have access to some of the people that he was able to interview is a legend in itself.
In Japan, when big mistakes are made, there is a cultural tendency (not always negative as well). In this context to sweep things under the rug and forget about it and living day to day life in Tokyo, most citizens do actually forget about it most of the time. But, it is easily ignored and visiting the affected area made me realize this again, deeply. But things are changing.

For example, Safecast is an innovative project sponsored by the MIT Media lab to gather open source data about the radiation levels. They have just reached over 50 million data points. They have helped quantify what is really happening in the areas affected by the nuclear fallout.

I guess from my perspective it made me concentrate on my own practical work to promote distributed solar energy. Eventually that led me into SolarCoin and ElectriCChain for many reasons. I am still at a loss for words about what can actually be done about the elephant in the room that is Fukushima Daiichi power plant and surrounding areas. It is far from fixed. Yet, as @japannews explains Nuclear Plants are starting to reopen in the risky fault zones in Shikoku.

Some photos: