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Local residents look out to sea from higher ground after evacuating their homes following an earthquake and tsunami alert in Iwaki, Fukushima prefecture, on November 22, 2016. Photo by Jiji Press / AFP

   A powerful offshore earthquake at 6 a.m. November 22 shook Fukushima-Daiichi in northeast Japan, site of the March 2011 “catastrophe cubed” – the combined 8.9 mega-quake, deadly tsunami, and three reactor meltdowns which resulted in 19,000 fatalities – sending shudders of fear across the prefecture, and bringing new meaning to the word “aftershock.” As sirens screamed, the national public television service NHK ran a continuous banner in the tsunami zone all morning demanding: “Flee Immediately.”  

The magnitude 7.4 quake generated a three-foot tsunami near the three destroyed Fukushima reactors and the site’s enormous collection of over 1,307 large makeshift tanks of radioactive water. A least 3,000 people in Fukushima Prefecture ran to evacuation centers, and schools were closed, but only 17 people were reported injured across Fukushima, Chiba, Tokyo and Miyagi Prefectures.

   Terrible memories of the 2011 disaster – the strongest quake ever recorded in Japan – were brought to mind as the cooling water system for one pool of highly radioactive and hot waste fuel rods was knocked out of commission, risking overheating of the uranium waste. Waste reactor fuel stays thermally and radioactively hot for eons and can cause enormous radiation releases if cooling water circulation is lost leading to the fuel catching fire. Cooling water was later restored

   Critics of Japan’s governmental push to restart the country’s shuttered fleet of over 42 reactors urged legislators to heed the quake’s warning. Centered off the coast of Fukushima, and about 6 miles under the surface, the quake was felt in Tokyo, 150 miles away.

   Even five years after the 2011 catastrophe, the Nov. 22 quake was identified as an aftershock stemming from the massive tectonic plate “snap” that caused the quake, tsunamis and meltdowns. The devastating tsunami killed at least 16,000 people outright, and 2,500 others were reported missing and never found. Decontamination work, soil collection and incineration, water management, repair of leaking storage tanks, and the robotic search for the melted uranium fuel under the three melted reactors is expected to continue for over 40 years and cost over $350 billion.

   Aftershocks have repeatedly rocked Fukushima’s radioactive exclusion zone, the site’s large waste fuel cooling pools, the 1,300-plus giant tanks of contaminated water, and the reactor complex’s 7,000 clean-up workers.

   In 2013, National Geographic reported that “The company [Tokyo Elec. Power Co.] continues to add to a massive tank farm on the site, with capacity to store about 400,000 tons (95 million gallons/360 million liters) of contaminated water, and is planning to add an additional 300,000 tons of capacity [by 2016]. [And] TEPCO must deal with an ever-increasing amount of contaminated water—nearly 150,000 tons (35.9 million gallons) a year…”

   In April this year two large earthquakes and a series of aftershocks on the Japanese island of Kyushu killed at least 41 people. And since 2011, earthquakes have occurred across Japan on April 7, 2011 (7.1 magnitude); April 11, 2011 (7.1); July 10, 2011 (7.0); Jan. 11, 2012 (6.8); Dec. 12, 2012 (7.3); May 30, 2015 (7.8); April 14, 2016 (6.2); and April 16, 2016 (7.0).

   Kiyoshi Kurokawa, an adjunct professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, told the New York Times that clean up attempts don’t address the real dangers of an earthquake-prone country relying on nuclear power. Kurokawa said Japan’s government and utilities should invest in solar or wind technology. “I think we expect more of such readjusting plate movements … and earthquakes have been rampant over the last five years, so why are we continuing to restart nuclear plants?” (Only two have been restarted, and one of them was soon shutdown.)