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TOKYO — Japan marked the second anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that swept through northern Japan, damaging more than one million homes and killing almost 19,000 people.
A moment of silence was observed at 2:46 p.m. local time on Monday at various locations where the scars of the disasters still remain.
While most of the debris has been cleared, progress has been extremely slow in redeveloping areas affected following the tsunami-triggered explosion at Fukushima Daicihi nuclear power plant.
More than 320,000 people remain displaced, many of them living in temporary housing units provided by the government.
Journalists have been given a rare glimpse inside Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was crippled in the 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the country two years ago. NBC News' Arata Yamamoto reports.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in December, vowed to accelerate the speed of the reconstruction efforts and his government has already expanded the relief budget to $266 billion to subsidize many of these projects.
"Our ancestors have overcome many difficulties and each time emerged stronger," Abe said.
Meanwhile, thousands of anti-nuclear protesters marched in Tokyo. "People and the media are starting to forget Fukushima and what happened there," one 32-year-old mother of two at the demonstration told Reuters.
This fall, the operators of the plant will begin extracting fuel rods from one of the less-damaged reactor units to mark the start of decommissioning the nuclear facility. But without a clear plan to carry out the removal for the rest of the reactors, the process is expected to take at least 40 years to complete.
Reuters contributed to this report.
An earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear meltdown -- residents of Japan's northeast coast suffered through three intertwined disasters after a massive 9.0 magnitude temblor struck off the coast on March 11, 2011.
Related:
Still searching for bodies two years after the tsunami in Japan
Rare tour of Fukushima reveals colossal decontamination efforts
This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 8:26 AM EDT
Leave a Comment:
What does not kill me ..... makes me sick.
Hello folks, this makes them stronger like Hiroshima and Nagasaki made them stronger. If they really want to get tough perhaps the PM can pray for an asteroid strike.
Stronger like the teenage mutant ninja turtles? Cowabunga!
so they knew this could happen. so why didn't they have proper safety measures in place? How come nobody is talking about what actually failed? Or at the very least, bring up what can be done to prevent this kind of thing.
That which doesn't kill me, will make me grow a third arm.
Godzilla!!!!
The correct pronunciation is ..... "Godzirra"..
Fukushima may or may not make Japan 'stronger', bit it will certainly make Japan more radioactive.
Just wait until the radioactive spiders start biting, the Japanese will become a race of super-humans!
So - the people that are allegedly the pinnacle of self woven moral fiber are being forced to live with an ecological disaster which will impact them for not years but centuries - all because they falsified safety records for a reactor designed when we were infants in our nuclear science and we should all feel bad for them? The home owners, the farmers, the local business owners, sure - they have my sympathy, donations, and I even think USCIS should offer them asylum in the USA...but, the engineers and executives that orchestrated this failure should be shot in the head at close range with serrated hollow points.
Huh? No engineers or executives orchestrated the tsunami. This is the ecological disaster that you are talking about, right?
I see your point, but it's kind of like saying Bush caused Hurricane Katrina. Japan always hated the fact that they depend on nuclear power. They protested for decades against it but the nation can only get so much oil. Nuclear power was cheap when they were suffering from economic woes, and some people thought it was safe. Safe, if you don't have a 8.9 earthquake, that is.
In a Doc Bruce Banner sorta way?
Running out of storage for the contaminated ground water and the cooling water still being poured into the damaged reactors, Tepco is releasing some of this water into the sea. There is still open atmospheric release ongoing. The Pacific ocean is big, but this pollution does not lose it's potency for thousands of years.
Scarier are the plans of many third world nations to construct reactors of similar design. Nations which arguably lack even the modest capability that Japan has demonstrated in dealing with such a crisis
Yes,l let us all remember that the tragedy of Fukushima was caused by a natural tsunami and not by a man-made nuclear reactor.
The reactor may be man-made, but such things need to take into account that disasters can happen that aren't man-made as well. Otherwise, you might as well be building sand castles by the sea.
The guy has a point. After Dr. Gannon was sprayed with gamma rays, he became the incredible Hulk. STRONG LIKE BULL!
I do still marvel at the resilience of the Japanese people.....
yes marvel spiderface...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-5uJVj6csE&feature=player_detailpage#t=142s
This is a news capture of a BBC broadcast marking the second-year anniversary of the Fukushima meltdown. Reactors 1, 2, and 3 - no idea as to what exactly is going on within the reactor cores. Still. After two years.
And I don't think they're even planning to do anything with the fuel rods in the cooling pools until 2014 with the damaged pool in #4 listing an additional(it wasn't level after the explosion) three feet since the building exploded.Artie Gunderson says he's moving to the southern hemisphere if the pool fails.
As a side note the "if it saves one child" crowd in Washington has kept it pretty quiet. I remember a month or so after the accident the French Nuclear Safety Authority warned pregnant women in their country of the dangers and were livid that the USA was not informing the public in this country and we're about six thousand miles closer.
The biggest news story since Chernobyl and it barley makes the news but if somebody turns in an expended grenade launcher tube at a police buy back the same story gets repeated every few weeks at least three times so far.
http://hosted2.ap.org/NMALJ/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-10-Japan-Tsunami-Dirty%20Cleanup/id-8dd42b374d8b4305b9c5536aa75e77fc
So far, disposal of debris from the disasters is turning out to have been anything but clean. Workers often lacking property oversight, training or proper equipment have dumped contaminated waste with scant regard for regulations or safety, as organized crime has infiltrated the cleanup process....
Meanwhile, workers complain of docked pay, unpaid hazard allowances — which should be 10,000 yen, or $110, a day — and of inadequate safety equipment and training for handling the hazardous waste they are clearing from towns, shores and forests after meltdowns of three nuclear plant reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-Ichi released radiation into the surrounding air, soil and ocean....
The cleanup is bound to overrun its budget by several times, as delays deepen due to a lack of long-term storage options as opposition among local residents in many areas hardens. It will leave Fukushima, whose huge farm and fisheries industry has been walloped by radiation fears, with 31 million tons of nuclear waste or more. Around Naraha, huge temporary dumps of radioactive waste, many football fields in size and stacked two huge bags deep, are scattered around the disaster zone...
radioactive fish... eat japanese fish..
You would get stronger if you stopped slaughtering whales. Until then, you will stay weak and infamous. Shame on Japan.
God bless the people in Japan that are still and forever will be affected by what happened. Japan is amazingly strong and they showed what a country can do even after the bombings in the end of WWII that killed so many and destroyed so much!
Japan now has a chance to rebuild and show others how green and self-sufficient a country can be when it is built the right way from the ground up.
I love the Japanese culture and their people and I especially hope one day to visit Tokyo for Halloween as I've seen how wild they celebrate over there! They are so out there and crazy in having fun!!
I think everything is fine near the coast, no problem here...