LIVE: Japan Remembers the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster 10 Years On | Top News

(Mar. 11) It's been 10 years since Japan's Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, but the rebuilding efforts continue. Laid waste by a nuclear disaster a decade ago, Japan’s Fukushima is still struggling to recover, even as the government tries to bring people and jobs back to former ghost towns by pouring in billions of dollars to decontaminate and rebuild.

But reconstruction efforts from the mundane -- supermarkets and transport infrastructure -- to a cutting-edge hydrogen energy plant have yet to entice more than a small fraction of the former population to return.

As the country marks the 10th anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, parts of Fukushima are still off limits and the prefecture remains a laggard in recovery. Its future is clouded by the 30 to 40 years it may take to decommission the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, near which millions of gallons of treated radioactive water are in storage.

Fukushima saw its population shrink by 10% to 1.8 million in the past decade, compared with a fall of only about 2.5% in neighboring Miyagi. Fukushima’s economy grew by 8.1% between 2010 and 2018, the latest year for which data is available, compared with 19% for Miyagi.

The return of Fukushima’s manufacturing capacity has lagged behind others, according to economist Yutaro Suzuki at Daiwa Institute of Research Holdings. While neighbors Iwate and Miyagi prefectures recovered manufacturing output to pre-disaster levels in 2012 and 2013 respectively, it took Fukushima until 2017 to get there stably, Suzuki wrote in a report ahead of the anniversary. The tourism industry, which had inched back to almost pre-disaster levels, has been crushed again by the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 160,000 people were evacuated from the region surrounding the plant after the magnitude 9 earthquake, the biggest ever recorded to hit Japan, caused a massive tsunami that overwhelmed the facility, shut off power to cooling systems and led to meltdowns of three reactor cores. The disaster left about 20,000 people missing or dead.

While areas further north that were worse hit by the tsunami could get to work quickly on rebuilding, the lingering radioactive contamination in Fukushima means some areas have yet to reach the start line.

Looking to the future, the Fukushima Innovation Coast, a series of projects promoting environmentally friendly energy, robot technology and other high-tech industries, is meant to rebuild industrial output.

One such venture is the hydrogen research and production plant built in Namie, on a site previously earmarked for another nuclear plant. The atomic energy plan was formally abandoned in 2013 and the land handed to the local government, making way for the Fukushima Hydrogen Energy Research field.

Slightly further north, on a site no longer considered suitable for housing after the tsunami, the government built a 7.7 billion yen ($71 million) robot testing ground that boasts facilities from a wind tunnel for testing drones to a pool for research into underwater robotics.

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