And it left an ongoing radioactive legacy, Fukushima Daiichi’s triple meltdown and hydrogen gas explosions sent plumes of radioactive particles into the air and sea. Areas to the northwest are deemed unlikely to be habitable and some completely out of bounds.

The waste will measure in the millions of tonnes, it would fill a fleet of the world’s largest container ships.

A report for the Japanese Diet said “collusion” between regulators and the operator Tokyo Electric Power Company that allowed lax enforcement turned a natural disaster into a “man-made” one.

Japan has enacted new rules on nuclear safety. It is now a legal requirement to avoid earthquake and tsunami risks when it once was voluntary.

China and international organisations have responded to Fukushima, but the region will go nuclear with more than 170 new reactors planned to be built.

To tell this story, South China Morning Post asked artists to bring it together in a comic. The result is these images from Craig Stephens and Tim Mcevenue.

Click to enlarge the images.

Scram

In near darkness, heat and steam, the workers were operating blind inside the tsunami­ stricken power plant as power ­loss had made metering ineffective and controls merely a gamble. A SCRAM, or emergency insertion of control rods inside the reactor to halt the nuclear fission process, had started about 30 seconds before the earthquake shook the building. Later they would be shaken by aftershocks then explosions that blew the roofs off one reactor building after another. They knew radiation exposure was a risk they had to take. The Fukushima ­50 nuclear engineers bravely fought and eventually lost the battle to cool three reactors. They faced the conditions, as well as bureaucratic meddling from the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s head office hundreds of kilometres

away, as they slowly reached meltdown in the days following the Tohoku Earthquake which struck at 2.46pm, March 11, 2011.

It was a man-made disaster

Picking through the pieces, inquiries found missed opportunities to ensure safety. TEPCO put off increasing the height of Fukushima Daiichi’s defences despite evidence mounted years before the earthquake that a future tsunami could be higher than the plant was built to withstand. It was clear from the other nearby plants like TEPCO’s Fukushima Daini that

weathered the great disaster that the height of the buildings and where emergency systems were placed was vital to their survival. “The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘man-made’,” the Japanese legislature or Diet’s independent report concluded.

In the hands of gangsters

Less than two years before the Fukushima disaster, the global financial crisis began. Temporary and casual workers ended up unemployed, some became homeless. So imagine how it would feel if to sleep at a train station as a man offers $100­-a-day, food and a uniform to pick up a mess. It’s safe, he says. These people are the nuclear gypsies, likened to India’s

untouchables. Their fate lies in the hands of the Yakuza, Japanese crime gangs, who bring workers to contractors. The way out for some is to be disqualified by exposure to the maximum radiation dose.

Nuclear gypsies

The public face of TEPCO’s estimated $250 billion clean-up are the self-sacrificing Fukushima-­50 and the engineers who followed. An army of 7,000 nuclear gypsies help them out of radiation suits and check for exposure while another 26,000 scrape topsoil into black bags and decontaminate buildings in the region.

Going home

Among the 164,000 people evacuated from Fukushima, just under 100,000 haven’t gone back. That’s despite the Japanese government’s incentives to return, and planned cuts to subsidised housing if they stay away. Houses hit by the tsunami or neglected for five years, or both, can be found uninhabitable upon return. For evacuees thinking of starting a family,

the radiation at their old homes would be above maximum doses set in European health standards for pregnant women and unborn babies, and well above those in Tokyo.

Fukushima’s legacy

The 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion is the only event comparable with Fukushima, both topped the scale of nuclear disasters. Four years after Chernobyl a spike in thyroid cancer rates in young people began. So, after Fukushima, Japanese authorities began to screen 380,000 people who were under 18 when the accident occurred using sharp ultrasound. The program has found more cancers, but it may be due to the extra screenings. One certainty is that hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers had to wait for their results, 134 people had malignant growths and 105 had them surgically removed.

Searching for the missing pieces

How do you solve a problem like Fukushima? As robots peer into the dark, they report back on the fatal radiation inside. Waste mounts up in 1,000 contaminated water tanks outside and low pyramids of 11 million dirt­filled black sacks. The weight of waste just from the plant, not including 1,800 square kilometres of topsoil gathered from the region, is estimated in the millions of tonnes. The thousands of spent fuel rods in pools must be taken to a central storage facility, but first remote tools that haven’t been built must clear away debris in the highly radioactive environment. Taking 1533 fuel rods from the reactor four building, which didn’t suffer meltdown, took 13 months. TEPCO aims to transfer all fuels by 2022. That says nothing about the radioactive molten cores, called fuel debris, inside reactors one, two and three: their whereabouts remain largely unknown.