‘The Days’: The Story of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Netflix's New Drama

Aug 17, 2023

The new eight-part drama covers the build up and fallout of a tragic episode in Japanese history

In the trailer for the new Japanese-language Netflix series, The Days, an incident at a nuclear power plant sparks a grave pronouncement: "It's going to be another Chernobyl".

It's a word that conjures feelings of dread in just about anyone who hears it. "Chernobyl", of course, is a reference to the meltdown and subsequent explosion at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant of the same name in 1986. The true death toll of the incident was initially covered up, and experts are still trying to accurate measure its impact; the UN once estimated that 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster, and predicted in 2005 that thousands more could eventually die due to exposure to radiation from the breakdown.

The Days is an eight-part drama that captures the nuclear meltdown that occurred in Fukushima, Japan, in early 2011. It captures the incident from three different perspectives and, like Craig Mazin's dramatisation of Chernobyl, "seeks to answer this question based on the true events of seven intense days from the perspectives of government, corporate organisations, and the people on site risking their lives," according to the official synopsis.

But what actually happened in the Fukushima nuclear blast?

At 2.46 in the afternoon of 11 March in 2011, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 struck the islands of Japan off the Sanriku coast. Almost an hour later, the aftereffect caused a 15-metre tall tsunami to sweep the island of Honshu, killing more than 18,000 people.

On the east coast of Japan was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. At first, the systems at the plant detected the earthquake and worked to automatically shut down the reactors, and triggered the emergency diesel generators to kick into action and continue to pump coolant around the cores.

However, the forceful wave of the tsunami broke the sea wall defence, and wiped out Fukushima power plant, also knocking out the emergency generators, and in turn the ability to cool the cores.

In a bid to restore power, the workers tried to get the plant up and running again, but three of the reactors overheated and the cores were partly melted. There were then several explosions in some of the buildings, which leaked radioactive matter out into the atmosphere. Water contaminated with radioactive isotopes were also released into the Pacific Ocean during and after the disaster.

More than 100,000 people were then evacuated from their homes, but as to date, just one person has died due to radiation exposure, while 16 people were injured following the hydrogen explosions.

The Fukushima disaster is one of only two nuclear explosions to be rated a 7 (the highest rating) on the International Nuclear Event Scale scale, with Chernobyl being the second.

According to the BBC: "An independent investigation set up by Japan's parliament concluded that Fukushima was ‘a profoundly man-made disaster’, blaming the energy company for failing to meet safety requirements or to plan for such an event. However, in 2019 a Japanese court cleared three former Tepco executives of negligence in what was the only criminal case to come out of the disaster."

Back in 2012, the then-prime minister Yoshihiko Noda said that "the state shared the blame for the disaster", but in 2017, a court case ruled that "the government bore partial responsibility" and that people who had been evacuated from the area at the time should be paid compensation.

According to Associated Press: "Japan is preparing to release a massive amount of treated radioactive wastewater [from the plant] into the sea."

130 tons of contaminated water created daily is collected, treated and then stored in 1,000 tanks on the site, and about 70 per cent of the ALPS-treated water, named after the machines used to filter it, and "still contains Cesium and other radionuclides that exceed releasable limits." And Tepco's plan is to release it into the sea surrounding the area, in the hope that the tanks won't be hit by another earthquake or tsunami before then. Greenpeace have said of this planned action: "The Japanese government's decision to discharge Fukushima contaminated water ignores human rights and international maritime law"

Meanwhile, fatal amounts of radioactive melted nuclear fuel remain inside the reactors and the decommissioning of the plant is proving near to impossible.

The Days streams on Netflix from June 1.

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