When residents of this quiet rice-farming area on Japan’s west coast watch news of the unfolding nuclear disaster in Fukushima, they do so with an added level of fear that comes from living in the shadow of an even bigger nuclear plant, one that sits directly on a fault line.
The images of smoke rising from a nuclear reactor are chillingly familiar to the tens of thousands of people who live a short drive from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa
Tokyo Electric Power Company, better known as TEPCO, operates both Kashiwazaki-Kariwa and the Fukushima Daiichi facilities damaged in the earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The company’s already battered reputation took another hit Sunday when it announced it had detected radiation levels 10 million times normal in the water inside Reactor No. 2 at Fukushima, only to sheepishly declare later in the day that the reading was “not credible” and that another measurement was required.
In the interim, the workers battling to bring Fukushima’s four damaged reactors under control were evacuated. It was not clear when they might be able to resume their daunting assignment.
Many of Kariwa’s 5,000 residents worry the fate that has befallen those who live around Fukushima – living in evacuation centres as radiation pollutes the region’s water and food – could easily be theirs. “We feel lucky that this reactor happened to cool down in 2007. Looking at Fukushima, we’re seeing what would have happened to us if it didn’t,” said Eiko Tamura, a 68-year-old retired high-school teacher who lives just 2.5 kilometres from Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, well within the 20-kilometre radius that has been evacuated around Fukushima.
All seven reactors at the plant were shut down following the 2007 quake and only four have since been allowed to resume operation. The quake caused a small amount of radioactive material from the spent-fuel storage pools in one of the reactors to leak into the sea.
Relief that the worst didn’t happen is heavily outweighed by fear of what might occur next time. In the aftermath of the 2007 quake, the Japan Meteorological Agency determined that Kashiwazaki-Kariwa sits directly on the fault that caused the quake.
TEPCO’s explanation for what is happening at Fukushima is the same one it offered four years ago: the earthquake was much larger than could have been anticipated. The tremor in July, 2007, that struck nine kilometres offshore in the Sea of Japan was a magnitude 6.8 (compared to the 9.0 quake that hit the northeast coast on March 11) and there was no subsequent tsunami. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was built to safely withstand a quake of up to 6.5 magnitude, though its safety measures have since been upgraded.
“We would like to express our sincere apology to those who live near Fukushima plant [and] all the people who are concerned about radiation,” TEPCO spokesman Kiyoto Ishikawa wrote in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail. “We will try our best to provide the necessary information as quickly as possible working closely with the government, so that the citizens will be able to live with sense of security.”
The Fukushima disaster has raised the volume of a decades-old debate over whether Japan, a country crisscrossed and surrounded by some 2,000 major and minor fault lines, should have 55 nuclear plants on its soil. Some 300 Japanese demonstrators – some of them wearing gas masks – marched past TEPCO’s Tokyo headquarters on Sunday chanting “We don’t need nuclear plants!”
