Yesterday was the second anniversary of the Fukushima disaster.
Friend and colleague Wayne Huber sent me this email from his Japanese friend and colleague, Shoichi Fujita in Tokyo. I posted a previous email on 6 December 2012.
The graphic is from the Wikipedia article. The caption:
Japan towns, villages, and cities in and around the Daiichi nuclear plant exclusion zone. The 20 km and 30 km areas had evacuation and sheltering orders, and additional administrative districts that had an evacuation order are highlighted.
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Dear my friends,
It is now 14:23 March 11 2013 JST, just two years after the heavy and terrible earthquake.
Then after that, TSUNAMI and three explosions of the nuclear plant in FUKUSHIMA followed.
The magnitude was 9.0, the highest level of the TSUNAMI was more than 9.3 meters.
This one year, we have 780 times of earthquakes, which is more than magnitude 4.0 in Japan.
The death toll from the accident climbed to 15,881.
The lost people who are not found yet toll stood 2668.
Evacuated peoples are (they cannot return their homes yet) 315,000 persons.
Destroyed houses are 128,801.
Among evacuated people, 1) their houses were destroyed by the earthquakes or TSUNAMI, they have not any house to live; 2) their houses were contaminated dangerously by the radioactive materials, they have good houses to live but they are heavily contaminated. They cannot come back to their homes.
Decontamination is very difficult to complete in the fields, roads, forests, and each house. The work is still carrying out continuously.
We need technologies of decontamination.
The contaminated sewage sludge accumulated and stored at many WWTP have no way to dispose. We need also the technologies to treat them.
In the nuclear power plant in FUKUSHIMA, cooling water for four reactors has no way to discharge. The contaminated water is kept in the site with many large tanks. The volume is increasing day by day. Finally I am afraid it will be discharged into the sea directly. We need seriously the technologies to treat them.
I am going to present a report “the influences of radioactive materials on the water environment”, which introduces the recent situation of water environment in Japan, at NOVATECH2013 this June in Lyon, France.
In other country, they have many nuclear plants, since they have little earthquakes there.
We have in Japan 54 plants around the country, while we have many earthquakes here. When you visit Tokyo, it is located at the end of the Tokyo Bay. Generally the area situated at the end of a bay accepts higher TSUMAMI than others.
Furthermore, just under the urban district of Tokyo, it is one of the candidate sources of the next big earthquake, with the south-east sea, Mt. Fuji, and others. We do not know where the next. We are keeping foods and waters enough for three days in every office and every home in Tokyo.
Two years after the accident, we are now preparing for the earthquakes, TSUMAMI, and nuclear accidents individually.
March 11, 2013 Shoichi FUJITA TOKYO JAPAN
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