If audiovisual platforms have something good, it is that any user, connected from Murcia or Hong Kong, can refresh or fatten their newspaper library after taking a walk through the extensive catalog of miniseries or documentaries focused on historical disasters with apocalyptic overtones. It happened with the acclaimed Chernobyl from HBO, whose ghost revived after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the fear that the war would hit the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
With a duller mass effect, but just as impressive, we now find another example in The daysa production that slipped into Netflix’s global top 10 and that narrates the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant through the courage of the employees who stayed working at the plant to avoid an even greater catastrophe.
The good reception of the series also coincides with the last great controversy around Fukushima: the Japanese government’s plan to release into the Pacific the water used to cool the plant’s three reactors, which melted down after the tsunami triggered by the offshore earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan on 11 March 2011. That contaminated water It has been stored in 1,000 tanks that are already at 97% of their capacity. For this reason, the authorities are accelerating these days the last inspections to begin this summer to release the water into the sea.
In Tokyo they advocate that the water will be diluted to safer levels than international standards (in terms of radiation) and gradually released into the ocean over decades, rendering it harmless to people and marine life. But the idea does not convince environmental groups, some marine scientists or neighboring countries like China or South Korea. Nor to the Fukushima fishermen themselves, who fear being burdened again with a cursed label (products under radioactive threat) from which they have never completely gotten rid of.
“We cannot support the government’s position that this discharge into the ocean is the only solution,” he says. Nozaki Tetsupresident of the Fukushima Fisheries Federation, recalling how the area’s depleted fishing industry has yet to recover from the shock of import bans they received from dozens of countries after the 2011 nuclear disaster.