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Japan on Tuesday marked the third anniversary of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that pummeled the eastern sea board and left more than 18,000 people dead or missing.
Three years ago at around 2:46 p.m. local time, a devastating 9. 0-magnitude earthquake struck off northeastern Japan, triggering a massive tsunami with waves as high as 20 meters washing away northeastern areas with the Tohoku region being one of the worst hit.
The massive tsunami knocked out key cooling functions at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear facility, causing three reactors to meltdown in an ongoing nuclear crisis never seen on such a scale since Chernobyl in 1986.
In total some 470,000 people had to be evacuated from the area, with around 267,000 people still living in temporary housing and makeshift residences three years after the quake-triggered tsunami and nuclear disasters.
Memorial services took place across the country, with silent prayers offered to those who lost their lives, and at a ceremony at Tokyo's National Theater, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised that reconstruction work, which is lagging far behind schedule, would be speeded up.
Abe and his administration have come under fire for not doing enough to relocate those still displaced three years after the disaster and for reconstruction work not being finished despite the government pumping massive amounts of money into such projects.
The nuclear disaster also forced thousands to evacuate from the area, with nearly 50,000 people still unable to return to the prefecture, according to the Reconstruction Agency's latest figures.
The government has earmarked a budget of 25 trillion yen for reconstruction for a five-year period from fiscal 2011, up from an initial 19 trillion yen, and plans to build 30,000 public housing units on higher ground, but only 3 percent have been completed so far, as the project lags sorely behind schedule.
The government is also facing an uphill battle to restart the nation's nuclear reactors which have remained offline for safety checks in the wake of the disaster three years ago, despite the government stating in 2011 that the crisis was under control.
Despite a great deal of public concern, Abe and his administration want to restart the idled reactors and said at a session of the House of Councillors' Budget Committee Monday that he wants to restart reactors that have cleared safety checks by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and will seek the understanding of a skeptical public.
Following the crisis at the Fukushima plant, the public have been concerned about the safety of nuclear power as Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), operator of the stricken Fukushima plant, has been grappling to contain the crisis.
Since the initial meltdowns, the utility has been beset with a myriad of problems and as recently as Feb. 13 said that samples of water it tested contained radioactive cesium at levels "never seen before."
TEPCO said there was a new leak at the site of a well located just 50 meters from the adjacent Pacific Ocean and confirmed that the levels of cesium found in its groundwater samples were as high as 54,000 becquerels per liter of cesium 137 and 22,000 becquerels per liter of cesium 134.
The levels of cesium detected were 600 times higher than the level allowed by the government regulation for contaminated wastewater to be released into the ocean, with the samples testing 30,000 times higher for cesium 137, compared to samples taken just a week earlier.
The utility has failed to locate the source of the leak, in another major failing of the utility to contain the ongoing nuclear crisis, observers said.
In addition, the Japanese government on Jan. 15 injected 4 trillion yen in additional state backing to help the ailing utility deal with a string of mishaps at its facilities as it works towards decommissioning its stricken, yet volatile reactors.
Despite the injection of fresh capital, TEPCO is still eyeing dumping toxic water into the Pacific Ocean as it fails to contain in makeshift storage tanks -- the source of a number of previous leaks -- a massive daily influx of water needed to cool the battered reactors, while nuclear experts believe that other methods need to be traversed before contaminating the ocean.
Dumping radioactive water into the ocean is of grave concern to local fisheries cooperatives as the potential for radioactive materials to spread to marine life remains a distinct possibility, despite TEPCO's assurances the levels of radioactivity will be kept well below the government's and regulator's limits.
The overall decommissioning of the plant is expected to take around 40 years, with the removal of all nuclear fuel from the No. 4 reactor building being completed by the end of this year, however TEPCO said it had only successfully removed around 9 percent of more than 1,500 unused and spent fuel assemblies in the reactor building's storage pool, as the crisis at the plant continues to rumble on three years after the tsunami struck. (1 U. S. dollar equals 103.3 Japanese yen)
