On the 11th of March in 2011, the Tohoku earthquake triggered a tsunami that broke against the coast of Japan and impaired the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Water waves flooded the cooling system that was keeping the plant’s six boiling nuclear water reactors in check and destroyed the energy pumps circulating the coolant water. SCRAM, the effort to stabilize the situation by placing control rods, failed; the rods became hot enough to melt themselves and in the meantime, for three days that March, a series of hydrogen-air chemical explosions transformed the plant into a nuclear circus. To make things worse, the ground under Pool Unit 4 sank and the structure neared collapsed. Rats chewed on sensitive wiring, and the situation escalated with time, with the worse afterlife surfacing through the cracks. In November of last year, crews again attempted to clean-up the rods but as the Economist suggested, “the drama is far from over.”

In July 2013, two years after the disaster, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) finally admitted the plant was leaking radioactive water into the ocean. By August, the company admitted that over three hundred metric tons of heavily contaminated water had entered the Pacific: leaks and fissures in the ground were pouring the poison right into the mouth of the ocean.

Soon after the event, Abderrachid Zitouni, a radiation specialist, expressed his own satisfactions, “At Fukushima, [the reactor’s] design is great. No human error.” Similarly, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, still on his tiptoes to host the 2020 Olympics insisted, “The situation is under control.” Meanwhile contractors recruited homeless people to participate in the clean-up effort because of the high radiation levels, and sea-life revealed evidence of dangerous radiation levels. With uncanny timing, weird creatures washed onto continental shores, among them an eighteen-foot serpent-like deep-sea Oarfish in California. Increased measures of mercury-poisoning and cancer rates eventually ignited broader concern, and by October 2012, forty countries had placed restrictions on fish imports from Japan.

The media combed the case like a side effect of brutal natural disaster, but scientific jargon and particularities have done little to communicate the damage sewn onto the Pacific seascape. Though the New York Times offered its dime on the story, for example, it mostly highlighted the need for reform in the United State’s own plants, with the same inadequate designs and safety standards. A report released by the Centre for Research on Globalization, however, warns this is “an issue of human survival.” The Unit 4 pool, standing on fragile and unregulated infrastructure, has the potential to emit more than 15,000 times the radiation released at Hiroshima.

A full clean-up would cost over 15 billion dollars, and experts point to both Japan and TEPCO’s limited resources, suggesting the need for international involvement. Indeed, the Corporate Responsibility Group (CRG) insisted that TEPCO lacked both the financial and expert resources needed to counteract the disaster, that the Japanese government was in no better position, and finally, that “the situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientist and engineers our species can muster.” The team petitioned the United Nations and Barack Obama to mobilize the global community to respond to the incident, but the effort proved fruitless. Another petition, organized by nukefree.org collected over 120,000 signatures, but again, failed to overcome political and corporate barriers.

An article by Ralph Nader, America’s third-party political environmentalist, entitled “The Fukushima Secrecy Syndrome” offers a glimpse into Japan’s own strategy and response: it goes something like, anything-but-bad-propaganda… This strategy of silence, moreover, although now of Japanese accord, does not sound all that unfamiliar: it was not until years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Americans finally allowed the Japanese to publicly discuss the event. Hello silence, my old friend.

Japan has a history locked in atomic catastrophes, which suggests the current situation is not so much a stranger on the global stage as a reminder of the dangers of nuclear power. In 1954, the United States conducted a nuclear test, “the most powerful thermonuclear device in history,” in the Pacific. Returning to the mainland two weeks after the bomb detonated, all twenty-three members of the crew on Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a Japanese tuna boat, suffered from acute radiation syndrome. The boat’s captain died a few months after, and over the next few years, the majority of his crew followed. This provoked a major outcry in Japan, and with a wind shift on dial, traces of the event reached Australia, Japan, and India, as well as the U.S and Europe. This goes to say, nuclear power knows no boundaries.

It makes sense, then, that the Fukushima disaster has fuelled a backlash against atomic power around the world, prompting protests from France to Taiwan. Many countries now question the place of atomic energy in their future. The German government, for example, closed several of its own nuclear reactors and declared that by 2022, it would shut down all its nuclear plants. Nevertheless, though a reduction of nuclear power lessens the risk of disasters and answers to concerns about the long-term storage of nuclear waste, it poses other challenges. In particular, the increased use of oil and coal for energy places different, but equally serious, burdens on the environment, among them emissions and spills threatening to increase global warming. Alternatives like wind power and solar energy exist as well, but countries have shown little interest in them because of their high costs. And the reality remains that there are over four hundred operational nuclear power reactors spread around the globe.

The Fukushima disaster is not the first time that Japanese corporations have demonstrated their disregard for the population and the environment. For decades between the 1930s and the late 1960s, the Chisso corporation continued dumping mercury into Minamata Bay. The mercury poisoned the nearby sea’s ecosystem and, in turn, the people depending on it for food. The local population coined the name “dancing cat fever” for the mercury’s effects on cats, which made them dance in grotesque convulsions. Over the years, nearly two thousand people died from the after-effects, but Chisso continued to hinder and oppose investigations. Moreover, determined not to deter business, the government did not recognize the disease until 1968, when popular activism made the disaster impossible to silence and forced Chisso to compensate some victims. The lack of concern shown by corporations begs the question, who is responsible to respond when corporate projects go amuck?

Back at Fukushima, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission declared that the causes of the disaster were man-made, and that though little could have stopped the tsunami from sweeping in from the sea, the events that followed were in no way “natural.” Certainly, seismic zones are an inlay of the earth’s tapestry, but it is human errors that cause nuclear disasters. In the case of Fukushima, ignorance certainly played a role, but let’s not underestimate political arrogance and corporate inadequacy. Japanese officials estimate that they will need forty years to clean up the mess, but the outcomes of the catastrophe remain uncertain.

By Madiha Bataineh and Didrik Dyrdal