Fukushima fishermen watch recovery slip away — LA Times

” Their lives are back in limbo because of the massive radioactive water leakage discovered at the tsunami-damaged nuclear plant.

SOMA, Japan — For much of his life, Koichi Matsumoto, 58, happily slipped out of bed in the dead of night to work on a fishing trawler.

But these days, his catch is tree branches, tires and other rubble still adrift since the massive earthquake and tsunami that shook Japan more than two years ago.

“It feels as if we’re right back where we were after the disaster,” which struck March 11, 2011, said Matsumoto, a third-generation fisherman and head of the trawl boat unit at the 1,000-member Soma-Futaba fisheries cooperative.

The lives of Matsumoto and about 1,500 other fishermen in the Fukushima region are back in flux because of the discovery in August that 300 tons of radioactive wastewater was pouring into the ocean each day from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

It’s unclear how long the massive volume has been leaking from underneath the damaged reactors and emergency wastewater tanks constructed nearby. It’s also uncertain how long it will take for the flow to be halted.

What is clear is that the leakage has proved a major setback for fishery operators, who had been slowly resuming work since mid-2012. At that time, they began test operations that allowed them to sell their catch — worth about $100 million in annual profit before the magnitude 9 earthquake — after screening it for radiation. More than 37 miles off the coast, they caught fish that didn’t show detectable levels of radioactive particles.

But now they are back to square one, their hope for a steady recovery dashed by the problems at the nuclear plant.

To make ends meet, Matsumoto and others have taken to using their trawlers for tasks such as rubble collection and radiation monitoring. The rubble pickup is paid for by the Japanese government. Some fishermen have also been hired to help at the nuclear plant by its owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco.

“We can’t fish as much, so we’ve been doing many public works projects,” Matsumoto said. … ”

read article