On Saturday, Japan commemorated the twelfth anniversary of the triple disaster on March 11, 2011, when one of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded in the world caused a tsunami, which led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Like every year, Japan observed a minute of silence at 14:46 local time (05:46 GMT), the time when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake shook the country in 2011, until it was felt in China.
The epicenter was located deep in the Pacific Ocean off the northeastern coast of Japan. And it caused a tsunami that flooded the area, as the waves sometimes reached the height of buildings, which led to the death or loss of about 18,500 people.
The waves washed over the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which borders the Pacific Ocean. The massive tsunami melted the cores of three reactors at the power plant, releasing large amounts of radiation into the air that settled on the land and in the water and created the worst civilian nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine in 1986.
This forced tens of thousands of residents of neighboring areas to urgently evacuate their homes, and entire districts became uninhabitable for years.
More than 1,650 square kilometers of the Fukushima area (about 12% of its total area) were denied entry in the months following the disaster. Intensive clearance work allowed to limit the uninhabited areas to 337 square kilometers of the area (2.4% of the total area).
And the Japanese judiciary announced in mid-January that three former officials of TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima plant, were acquitted of negligence in the 2011 accident. It is expected that the purification work and the dismantling of the nuclear plant will continue for decades.
One of the critical tasks is dealing with more than a million tons of contaminated water at the plant site, from rainwater, groundwater and water used to cool the reactors. This water was treated, but it was not possible to remove tritium, a radionuclide that is dangerous to humans only in highly concentrated doses.
The Japanese government reiterated that it intends to start this year the gradual disposal of this water by dumping it in small quantities in the Pacific Ocean. The process is controversial, but it has the support of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supervising it.