(Tokyo) Japan discreetly commemorates Friday the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, when one of the most violent earthquakes ever recorded in the world caused a very deadly tsunami, which also caused the nuclear disaster of Fukushima.
Posted at 10:15 p.m.
For the first time, no ceremony of national scope was organized this year in memory of the victims, the Japanese State having decided to cease these commemorations after the ten years of the tragedy last year.
A minute of silence in the country, however, is scheduled every March 11 at 2:46 p.m. local time (12:46 a.m. ET): the moment when in 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook the entire archipelago and was felt to China.
Coming from the depths of the basement of the Pacific Ocean, off the northeast coast of Japan, the terrible tremor caused a tsunami whose waves, sometimes as high as buildings, fell on the region.
The heavy human toll of nearly 18,500 dead or missing was caused mainly by the tsunami.
But the raging waves have also invaded the Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant, bordering the Pacific. The cores of three of its reactors went into meltdown, causing the worst civil nuclear disaster since Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986.
This accident led to radioactive leaks which forced tens of thousands of residents of the surrounding areas to urgently evacuate their homes, often permanently.
More than 1650 km2 of the Fukushima department (12% of its area) had been denied access in the months following the disaster. Intense decontamination work has reduced these uninhabitable areas to 337 km2or 2.4% of the department.
All the municipalities that had been evacuated have found inhabitants, but many do not wish to return for fear of radiation.
Up to nearly 165,000 people in the department had evacuated their homes, either by obligation or by personal choice. Local authorities still count 33,365 displaced people today, 80% of whom live outside the department of Fukushima.
In addition to the titanic project of decontamination and dismantling of the nuclear power plant, many other challenges persist, starting with the reputation of local food products, although their safety is rigorously controlled.
This image is likely to suffer from the project validated last year by the Japanese government to discharge into the ocean more than a million tons of contaminated water from the Fukushima power plant and still containing tritium.