Tokyo should jettison nuclear option once and for all

IT is five years almost exactly to the day since March 11, 2011 when a terrifying sequence of events - a devastating earthquake, a colossal tsunami and a nuclear meltdown - unfolded in rapid succession on Japan's north-east coast. Those events are in the past, yet the past lives on in sinister ways.

The world has largely forgotten the immediate horror of March 11 when 16,000 people died, crushed to death or swept out to sea like so many broken dolls with their homes, vehicles and possessions carried away with them and when tens of thousands more were injured and more than a hundred thousand evacuated.

Physical trauma such as that inflicted with particular savagery upon Japan's Tohoko region by the Magnitude 9 earthquake and the 15 metre-high tidal wave five years ago begins to fade with time, rebuilding takes place and people begin, slowly and painfully, to pick up their lives again.

But a hidden enemy still stalks the land around the Fukushima nuclear complex, and it is in many ways more frightening even than the still visible wreckage and mayhem created by the earthquake and tsunami. It is nuclear radiation, and the pollution of land and sea in the area. It is neither our aim or intention to apportion blame for the "man-made" elements of the March 11, 2011 nuclear disaster (the quake and tsunami being supposedly Acts of God), although a citizens group has recently lodged a case to prosecute certain officials.

But it does seem strange that the government is eager to resume operations of the dozens of other nuclear power plants that were shut down following the Fukushima disaster and which are now being rebooted one by one, despite local protests and occasional radioactive leakages.

Despite, too, the fact that radioactive cooling and groundwater continue to issue from the mortally damaged reactors inside the Fukushima complex, despite the uncertain incidence of radiation-induced cancers, and despite the massive amounts of stored and irradiated soil and other matter.

The Pacific Ocean off the Tohoko coastline, meanwhile, continues to absorb radiation. Not in doses large enough to affect immediately the fishery resources key to the area's livelihood but, according to some evidence, enough to affect marine organisms in the food chain. It can be argued that nuclear power is a flawed and morally wrong technology to employ in any country's energy mix, given that a nuclear reaction is much harder to stop than it is to start.

This was very obviously in the case of Fukushima, Russia's Chernobyl disaster or the US Three Mile Island nuclear accident. These are accidents that are waiting to happen and accidents, as they say, will happen. And this says nothing of the problem of dealing with hazardous nuclear waste.

In the case of a manifestly earthquake-prone land such as Japan, the employment (and now re-employment, despite Fukushima) of nuclear power is particularly questionable. Two former prime ministers have campaigned actively against the nuclear policy, but seemingly to no avail.

To make matters worse, the working life of some already ageing nuclear reactors is being extended with official blessing. Thus, not even the defence that modern reactors are safer is available. The government should think again.