FUKUSHIMA
WHAT HAPPENED?
On Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:46 PM, the Great East Japan earthquake shook the ground with an extremely dangerous, high magnitude of 9.0.
By the last day of 2011, Tepco had checked the radiation exposure of 19,594 people who had worked on the Fukushima site since March 11th, the day of the accident. They reported that 167 workers contained doses over 100 mSv. Of those, six workers had over 250 mSv from inhaling iodine-131 fume. No one died from acute radiation syndrome, although a few hundred workers on the Fukushima site were exposed to high levels of radiation. High radiation levels kept three of the buildings dangerous throughout 2011 and 2012. 160,000 local people of Fukushima who lived near the power plants had to evacuate immediately. Approximately half of them got to return home in late 2012, while the other half remained displaced until late 2013 because the Japanese government felt the radiation levels were too dangerous to live near.