THE Japan Today marks the 12th anniversary of the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, when one of the world’s most powerful earthquakes ever recorded triggered a deadly tsunami, leading to the nuclear devastation of Fukushima.

As every year, a minute’s silence was observed in the country at 14:46 local time (07:46 Greek time). At that time 12 years ago a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook the entire archipelago and was felt as far away as China.

The powerful earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan caused a tsunami, whose waves were sometimes the height of buildings, to sweep the area.

The tsunami is mainly responsible for the heavy toll of almost 18,500 dead or missing in the disaster.

The ensuing nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which flooded and caused the cores of three of its six reactors to melt down, forced tens of thousands of people from their homes and left entire areas uninhabitable for years.

Access to more than 1,650 square kilometers in Fukushima prefecture, or 12% of its area, was prohibited in the months following the disaster. Since then, massive decontamination work has allowed the area of ​​uninhabitable zones to be reduced to 337 square kilometers, i.e. 2.4% of the prefecture.

The Japanese judiciary upheld in mid-January the acquittal of three former officials of Tepco, the company that manages the Fukushima nuclear power plant — the only natural persons tried for criminal responsibility in the context of the disaster — who were found not guilty and cleared of the charge for negligence in the 2011 accident.

Decontamination and decommissioning of the station is expected to take decades.

One of the critical points is the management of the more than one million tons of contaminated water that has accumulated on the site of the plant, which comes from rain, groundwater and the necessary injections to cool the reactor cores.

These waters have been treated to purify them, but tritium, a radioactive element that is not dangerous to humans except in very high concentrations, has not been eliminated.

The Japanese government has reaffirmed that it plans to begin this year’s very gradual dumping of that water into the Pacific Ocean, a controversial project that has nevertheless received a favorable opinion from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which oversees it, and Japanese regulators. principles on nuclear energy.