Fukushima’s Collateral Damage

Keep out. We really mean it. And we can’t tell you when you can come back.

That was the message from the Japanese government this week to the residents of the Fukushima evacuation zone. Six weeks after the crisis at the plant began, authorities are now threatening to arrest and fine anyone caught within the roughly 20-kilometer zone around the still-unstable nuclear reactors. The tougher stance is a stark reminder to local residents that while the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has become somewhat less critical in the last couple of weeks, it’s still volatile and dangerous. And that their exile from their homes and communities will be long, and in some cases, perhaps, permanent.

The government’s move wasn’t in response to any new developments at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. On the contrary, things there have settled into what you might call a “chronic emergency,” as opposed to the acute emergency of the first few weeks after March 11.

Instead, the clampdown seems to have come in response to the discovery of roughly 60 families still living in the evacuation zone, and a lot of other residents sneaking in to fetch things. It’s also an emphatic statement by the government that despite the lull in dramatic events at the plant, the region is still a hot zone. And that until the reactors are brought to a cold shutdown, there’s still a risk of new radiation releases.

So for the indefinite future, anyone caught entering the exclusion zone can be fined up to 100,000 yen – or roughly $1,200. The government says it will organize bus trips into the abandoned communities for one person from each household, who’ll be allowed to go into their homes for up to two hours to collect valuables. But then everyone and every thing coming out of the area will be screened for radiation.

No one at all will be allowed to go in to the most highly – contaminated area within about two miles of the plant.

No one’s saying how long this no-go zone will be enforced, but it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that it will be quite a long time. The plant’s owners, Tokyo Electric Power Company, says it will take at least nine months to bring the crippled reactors under control. Many observers think that’s a very optimistic timeline. And of course no one can yet say when the risk from the radiation that’s already there will fall to acceptable levels. In some places it could be years, in others it could be decades or longer.

Meanwhile, the collateral damage from Fukushima continues to spread a good deal farther – not in terms of human or environmental health but in the health of the nuclear industry itself.

Since the tsunami hit Fukushima on March 11, governments around the world have started backing away from their commitments to nuclear power. The US has been a notable exception – the Obama administration has said it’s still committed to expanding nuclear power, albeit with tougher regulations. But the market here seems to be sending a different message. On Thursday NRG Energy said it’s pulling out of an effort build two new nuclear plants in Texas, citing regulatory and market uncertainties.

In other words, they’re not sure they can get the plant built, and they’re not sure they could sell its power if they did.

The bigger message here is that unless the federal government starts dolling out even more generous subsidies and protections to the nuclear industry – not likely on either political or budgetary grounds – it won’t matter what Barak Obama or even the next few presidents say they want to do when it comes to nuclear power. Three Mile Island put the domestic nuclear industry into a 25-year coma. Fukushima is a lot farther away from Washington but also a lot worse than TMI, and the odds are that it will have a similarly chilling effect.

NRG also says they’re not confident in the ability of their partners in the Texas project to come through. Who were those partners? One was the Japanese nuclear plant manufacturer Toshiba, which built one of Fukushima’s crippled reactors. The other was none other than Tokyo Electric Power, which owns the Fukushima plants.

NRG’s chief executive told the Wall Street Journal that “there’s no reason to believe our Japanese partners want to go forward, either. They haven’t been calling us to reassure us.”

Nor, it seems, have they been calling to reassure anyone closer to home, either.