http://archive.today/2026.03.12-075457/https://thebulletin.org/2026/03/fukushima-at-15-living-with-radioactive-hot-spots-and-stigma/

"Thyroid cancer used to be rare in Fukushima Prefecture, with one case in a million.

After five rounds of screening, the incidence rate is now 400 cases out of 380,000 people—1,000 times higher than before the disaster."

—Thomas A. Bass

Fifteen years later, 4,000 workers struggle to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors remain so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. No one knows exactly where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals, possibly into the ground. The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than 1,000 tanks that reached capacity in 2023. This cooling water, which Tepco initially claimed was clean and has been releasing into the Pacific Ocean since 2023, was found to be contaminated with 62 radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Two fuel pools packed with spent nuclear fuel have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to fall over and spill into the ocean.

Cesium-laden microparticles from Fukushima have been found in air filters across Japan. As one drives the highways in Fukushima, some of the large green road signs that would usually indicate towns and turnoffs have been replaced by panels displaying radiation levels, given in microsieverts per hour. (A microsievert measures the biological effect of ionizing radiation on human tissue.) These readings can spike to dangerous levels depending on which way the wind is blowing. The radioactive material blown out of the destroyed reactors made Fukushima’s forests, which cover three-quarters of the nuclear exclusion zone, unsafe to enter. The wild boars that used to be hunted here, as well as the plants and mushrooms that used to be foraged for food, are too radioactive to eat.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Japanese government denies that Fukushima is an ongoing disaster.

“The situation is under control,” then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the International Olympic Committee as he lobbied for Japan to hold the 2020 Summer Olympics (which were delayed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Dubbed the “Recovery Olympics,” the torch was run through Fukushima’s depopulated towns before the first games were played at a baseball stadium in Fukushima City.