Nuclear choices

At 8:15am on the morning of 6 August 1945, 600 metres up and a few metres north of what is now a 7-Eleven convenience store in central Hiroshima, the world changed forever. In the sky a piece of uranium-235 was slammed into another disc of the same element in the barrel of the bomb its designers had christened “Little Boy”. Reaching criticality, it emitted a silent flash and heated the air around it to over 4,000 degrees centigrade in less than half a second. Around 60,000 people were killed instantly, vaporised by the heat. Those further away were thrown to the ground and trapped under their homes as they burned. There had been no warning.

“Every time I walk through the Peace Memorial Park I remember the faces of Hibakusha I have met and their stories,” says Yuna Okajima, a human rights activist and guide who is tasked with preserving the memory of both the victims and survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Hibakusha, or bomb-affected people, is the label given to survivors of this and the second US atomic bombing in Nagasaki a few days later. As the number of atomic bomb survivors dwindles 80 years on from the twin attacks, their descendants have begun to assume the responsibility of showing the horrors of nuclear warfare.

We need to listen to their voices. The Doomsday Clock set up by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists after the Hiroshima bomb dropped is later than it has ever been: now at 89 seconds to midnight. The time is meant to symbolise how close we are to “destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making”.

In recent years, the threat of nuclear conflict has resurfaced, non-proliferation movements are faltering, and climate change and technological acceleration have created ever more complex dangers. Russia is threatening to use its nuclear capabilities on the battlefield, rogue states like North Korea are armed, and the future of Iran’s nuclear programme is in the spotlight after the US-Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites.

Meanwhile, Britain stands alongside many other developed countries in committing to new nuclear power stations to meet energy demand and decrease the use of fossil fuels. Nowhere is this nuclear complexity clearer than in Japan, where the memory of nuclear war and the danger of civil nuclear disaster sit firmly in the public consciousness.

Powerful weapons

Okajima and I are sitting on the roof terrace of a high-rise hotel next to the Peace Memorial Park, about as near to the actual point of detonation of the A-bomb as it is possible to get. At the moment the bomb went critical, anything and anyone located under the hypocentre would have been instantly vaporised. At 8.16am, Okajima’s great-grandfather was a few hundred metres away, on a horse on his way to Hiroshima Castle on the north side of town where the local air raid command was located. He was one of the first victims of the new age of the atom. “For me personally, ever since I learned that my great-grandfather died because of the atomic bomb and that my grandparents are survivors, I have felt that the atomic bomb is something deeply connected to me,” she says.

The bomb announced to Japan and the world that the US had the ability to sweep whole cities off the map, far from its home shores, with a single aircraft. After the initial shock of sudden mass death on a scale never seen before, the death rate continued to rise in the days, weeks and months after, as more and more people succumbed to radiation poisoning and burns without understanding why. There have been many more victims of radiation exposure since 1945, including Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist who helped build the Hiroshima bomb and constructed the world’s first functioning reactor at the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project.

Fermi died from stomach cancer nine years after Hiroshima, likely from radiation exposure during his experiments. He lived just long enough to see the US embark on a project that President Eisenhower christened “Atoms for Peace”. Allies around the world were encouraged to build nuclear power stations with American technology, showing that US nuclear development was a force for good, powering the post-war economic booms. Japan was one of the biggest buyers, and at its peak had 54 operable nuclear reactors. Anxiety about nuclear conflict was glossed over with technological utopianism about the limitless energy of the atom.

Mayu Seto is an anti-nuclear weapons campaigner in Hiroshima with Peace Culture Village – an NGO that helps people perpetuate the memory of the nuclear attack through education and peace dialogue. Her grandparents were in Nagasaki when the second bomb hit. She is one of many campaigners and descendants of survivors who fear that rising global tensions are leading us once more to the brink of nuclear attack. “Look what a single bomb was capable of doing 80 years ago. Now there are even more powerful weapons,” she says. “We imagine something like that could not happen again, but the risk of repeating [a nuclear attack] is high.” Activists have begun to talk about Gurobaru Hibakusha – global Hibakusha – extending not just to victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to all victims of nuclear testing, accidents and contamination.

Nuclear meltdown

These include the victims of civil nuclear disaster. Sixty-five years, seven months, 233 days and six hours after uranium met uranium in the barrel of the Hiroshima bomb, something emerged from the Pacific depths that would re-awaken Japan’s nuclear anxieties. On 11 March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake – the fourth most powerful quake ever recorded – struck off the coast of Fukushima prefecture. Peaking at nine on the Richter scale, the shockwaves created a tsunami that raced toward the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located a few hours north of Tokyo.

At the plant, earthquake sensors triggered an automatic shutdown of the three active nuclear reactors. But even with fission stopped, the reactor was still at operating temperature. Less than an hour after the shutdown, the plant was hit by the first of several tsunami waves, the largest of which was 15 metres. It began a chain of events that resulted in a meltdown, followed by a non-nuclear hydrogen explosion that ripped through the reactor halls, sending plumes of radioactive particles across the countryside and out to sea.

I meet Miyuki Ishii in her hometown of Futaba, near the power station. She was at home when the power plant failed, getting ready to see her grandchildren. “Through the glass I saw buses and people wearing protective [hazmat] suits. I was shocked. I couldn’t imagine it would be a hydrogen explosion or anything like that,” she tells me. We’re having tea at one of the government-sponsored retail spaces that have recently opened in the town, now habitable again after a decade-long restoration operation, involving the demolition of buildings, deep cleaning and topsoil removal.

Whole villages had vanished under the wave that day, while the rescue operation was hampered by the radiation danger. Ishii tells me how her daughter-in-law, a teacher at a primary school on the coast north of the power plant, sprinted a whole kilometre with her class to higher ground, saving their lives. Like thousands of others, Ishii became an internal refugee, moving from place to place as the scale of the contamination became clear. She left Futaba with her mother and sister, but both died of age-related natural causes before they could return. Now she lives in a new house by the rebuilt railway station and town square. “I feel like I’m carrying their feelings and wishes,” she says.

The 20km exclusion zone declared after the disaster has slowly shrunk as the cleanup has progressed. The towns around the old power station are now habitable again, with doses as low as 0.1 microsievert per hour, around the same as background radiation worldwide. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the plant itself, is responsible for cleaning up and decommissioning the reactors. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has poured billions into cleanup and revitalisation efforts, repopulating the area and developing a renewables industry.

The energy challenge

Japan is one of the world’s most energy intensive economies and its huge electricity demand is a big challenge. The loss of the six reactors at Daiichi and the decision to shut down the nearby Fukushima Daiini station (daiichi and daiini are Japanese for one and two) meant that the Tokyo megalopolis had to rely on coal power to keep its trains moving and air conditioning units running. After the disaster, Tokyo suffered rolling blackouts. Japan’s renewables progress is far behind other developed economies, but Fukushima prefecture is now a lab for low-carbon technologies. Abandoned rice paddies have been repurposed as solar farms, and on the ridge behind Fukushima Daiichi, the biggest wind farm in the country has just come online.

In Namie, another of the towns most affected by the evacuation and radioactive contamination, Takatoshi Shiga proudly shows off a recently constructed hydrogen plant that uses solar panels to create zero-carbon hydrogen for use in fuel cells. He is younger than most of the returnees. “The image of Fukushima remains that of the tsunami and the nuclear accident. That hasn’t really changed. But now, as we undertake renewable energy projects, we want the world to see this region in a new light,” he says.

Despite these efforts in solar and wind, today Japan has the lowest renewables share of any of the G7 countries – around 20 per cent, made up largely of hydro schemes. Responding to increasing energy demands, and the need to move away from fossil fuels, the Japanese government announced plans early this year to reopen and extend the lives of nuclear reactors in other areas of the country. Prior to the Fukushima disaster Japan had 54 operable reactors, all of which were taken offline after the disaster for safety checks. By 2025, 14 had been restarted and the Tokyo government has now also committed to building new generation reactors starting from the 2030s. Public opposition has been high, but Japan is the world’s second biggest importer of fossil fuel, and it is keen to change this to combat climate change and reduce reliance on Chinese and Russian sources of energy.

Tomoko Kobayashi is one of the many residents of the Fukushima coast who believe it is important to keep the memory of the disaster alive. In 2016, she reopened a traditional Japanese inn in the town of Odaka, on the northern edge of the former exclusion zone – one of the first tourist sites in the area. Guests are often in town to take guided tours of the Daiichi and its damaged reactor buildings. As you walk into the inn, one of the first things you notice is a Geiger counter strapped to the wall by the door.

“I feel that continuing to observe and learn from this experience is important to me personally,” Kobayashi tells me. “Ideally, I think we don’t need nuclear power. So I’d prefer we find ways not to rely on electricity so much, or pursue other energy options, but that hasn’t really happened [across Japan].” Other residents of Odaka took the compensation packages offered by TEPCO and built lives elsewhere. But Kobayashi, like many elderly returnees, wanted to reclaim her hometown from the disaster and spend her final years there. The corridors of the inn are adorned with pictures of what in Japan has come to be known as the “Triple Disaster” of the earthquake, tsunami and meltdown, as well as posters from Ukraine showing solidarity with victims of the Chernobyl disaster and – more recently – the Russian invasion. Kobayashi herself has made several trips to the site on the Ukraine-Belarus border where a Soviet designed reactor experienced a meltdown in 1986.

Two kinds of threat

Meanwhile, the cleanup in Japan is not over. One of the major challenges is contamination of the coastal farmland. Millions of bags of contaminated earth were collected and buried around the plant. After 30 years they will be dug up and moved again, but the destination is unknown as Japan still has no long-term storage solution for highly radioactive waste. It is one of the reasons some in Japan, like Kobayashi, are against any new nuclear power plants being built at all. Yet, as climate change continues to knock at the door, exacerbating Japan’s vulnerability to climate shocks and natural disaster, the risks of nuclear accidents are – in the eyes of many – still outweighed by the benefits of carbon-free energy.

Eishige Konno has experienced both challenges. He returned home to his farm a few miles from the plant when the soil was declared safe again in 2017. But now he faces another problem, around heatwaves and drought. “We had ‘dead rice’, you know, white centred grains and that kind of thing,” he says, describing how the unusual heat dries out the interior of the rice whilst it is still in the ground, causing it to crack. “It’s something you feel in your skin,” he says. “It doesn’t snow at all anymore … And maybe it’s because of what they call global warming.”

It’s a difficult task, to compare these two kinds of threat. The scientists working on the Manhattan Project had feared there was a small possibility that nuclear fission could ignite the atmosphere. It never came to pass, but climate scientists have calculated that the amount of energy being trapped in the world’s oceans due to global heating is equivalent to the heat produced by five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs going off, per second, over the past three decades. As the world barrels towards two degrees of global warming the urgency of ending our addiction to coal and oil grows ever stronger.

Futaba once had a sign in the main street saying “Nuclear Energy for a Bright Future”. It was removed by the local mayor after the disaster – he could not bear to see it. The sign now resides in a museum. Before entering the Fukushima Daiichi plant to see the damaged reactor buildings, visitors encounter a very different message: a mea culpa by its operators. “Our confidence was in fact arrogance,” reads the text. Persuading the public that nuclear energy can be safe, and that recovery is possible, is key to the sector’s offer to slash carbon. The utopian refrain of nuclear power for a bright future has been replaced by the new realism of nuclear power for a liveable one. But nobody is under any illusions about how easy it will be to convince the Japanese public, given the nation’s history.

Any moment of supreme human suffering deserves to be commemorated and remembered, but only afterwards do we see them for what they are. Hiroshima and Fukushima are very different tragedies, yet they can both tell us about our common future. Both offer lessons in how to recover without forgetting, of how to renew without obscuring the enormity of what has happened. As we confront the spectre of climate change, and the transformation of our world by our own hands, that is perhaps the most important message to carry with us.

This article is from New Humanist’s Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.