A Tokyo court has sentenced the four top officials of the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant to pay 13.32 trillion yen (97,000 million euros). for not preventing the disaster. This is the largest compensation ever awarded in a civil case in the history of Japan. And it has to be a world record or close.

On March 11, 2011, we choked on our breakfast when we learned of an impressive underwater earthquake measuring 8.9 on the open Richter scale, the largest ever recorded in Japan and the fifth largest in human history to date. The aftershocks and tsunami with ten-meter waves devastated Japan’s northeastern coast, destroying everything in its path, leaving nearly 20,000 dead or missing, half a million evacuees, incalculable economic costs, and Japan’s biggest crisis since World War II.

The most serious consequence after direct casualties was the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant. Qualified with the highest degree in this type of disasters (INES level 7) was the second most serious in the history of civil nuclear power after Chernobyl. Ironically, just one month after the events in Fukushima, the 25th anniversary of the disaster in Ukraine was “commemorated”.

Fukushima: a historical condemnation

The sentence is historic, and not only because of its amount. The court ruled that nuclear power plant operators «they have a duty to prevent serious accidents based on the latest scientific and technical expertise and that, in this case, executives failed to heed credible warnings.”.

In Japan, handling such cases without assigning personal responsibilities is not understood, and this is what happened to four top managers of the nuclear power plant. On the contrary, the same court found them not guilty of professional negligence “failure to predict the size of the tsunami that triggered the disaster”.

It is clear that four people will not be able to pay a fine for damages of this amount, but it is a warning to sailors about the responsibility of operating this kind of energy. 10 years later, there are still more lawsuits to file, and the company responsible, now in the hands of plaintiffs, has pledged a decade-long effort to dismantle the facility and clean the area of ​​contamination if possible because radioactive elements like Xenon-133 will be active for 600 years or Plutonium-239 which will last for an incredible 24,000 years.

Its involvement in downstream diseases such as cancer does not count, but if we consider Chernobyl research must be very serious. In my humble opinion, nuclear energy must not be part of the future, even if it will have to be used as a transition. Renewable energy has been the cheapest option for years even without subsidies. All that remains is that whoever governs, governs for the citizens and very powerful interests allow it.

And it would be desirable to progress to another “nuclear”, that Fusion, with the goal of obtaining unlimited, cheap and practically clean energy (not completely), but radically reducing the dependence on fossil fuels. And also uncontrollable nuclear energy and its consequences, in a small number of cases, but catastrophic as in Fukushima.

The European Commission has presented a proposal for measures in response to the energy crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. It is an “opportunity” for bet definitively on Renewables and Fusionif we let go of dependence on such unreliable types (for being soft) like Putin (and other such furries) and help pull the planet out of the abyss into which the fossil fuel-based economic and living model has led.