Dead zone: Japan allows glimpse into Fukushima’s heart

TWO reactor buildings once painted a cheery sky blue loom over the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Their roofs are blasted away, their concrete walls reduced to steel frames.

In their shadow, plumbers, electricians and lorry drivers, sometimes in the thousands, go about their work, clad from head to toe in white radiation suits. Their job – cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl – will take decades.

Reporters, also in protective suits, yesterday visited the facility for the first time since Japan’s worst tsunami in centuries, in March, caused reactor meltdowns, and turned hundreds of square miles of countryside into a no-go area.

Eight months on, the six-reactor plant remains a shambles. Mangled lorries, tipped over by the wave, still clutter its access roads. Rubble remains strewn where it fell. Pools of water dot its once immaculate campus.

Tens of thousands of the plant’s former neighbours may never be able to return. And just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki become icons of the horrors of nuclear weapons, Fukushima has become a symbol for the global anti-nuclear energy movement.

Yet this picture is one of progress, Japanese officials say. It has taken this long to make the plant stable enough to allow yesterday’s tour, which included representatives of the Japanese and international media.

The group was taken through the facility, a once-neat row of reactor buildings now shells of shattered walls and steel frames. Journalists were briefed inside the emergency operations centre, a spacious, bunkerlike structure where it is safe to remove the heavy protective gear required outdoors.

Woefully unprepared for the wave that swept over its breakwater the plant, 140 miles north-east of Tokyo, was doomed.

“During the first week of the accident, I thought several times that we were all going to die,” plant chief Masao Yoshida said.

At the height of the crisis all but a few dozen workers – “the Fukushima 50” – were evacuated. Officials say that up to 3,000 a day work at the plant, compared to a pre-crisis workforce of 6,400. More than 480,000 sets of used protective gear – which can be worn only once – lie in crates or plastic bags at the complex which, pre- tsunami, was a training facility for national-level football teams.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, says it will achieve a “cold shutdown” by the end of the year – a first step toward creating a stable enough environment for work to start on removing the reactors’ fuel rods and closing the plant. The no-go zone is likely to remain for years, if not decades, to come.