Isabelle Boemeke

It was the inundation of the diesel generators in the basement.

And this was a lot less radiation went into the environment, precisely because it was more a modern reactor design.

And people were evacuated really quickly, which was the opposite of Chernobyl.

Imagine an evacuation process dealing with the aftermath of a huge earthquake and a huge tsunami and a nuclear accident.

Yeah.

And so something like 2,300 people died from Fukushima, but it was all because of the evacuation process.

So it was people who needed medical care and couldn't get it.

It was people who, you know, for one reason or another died because of the evacuation process.

Not because of the radiation.

Then now from radiation exposure, there's one plant worker who died from lung cancer many years later down the road and his family got compensated.

It's kind of like impossible to know that his cancer was caused by the accident.

But because they were really quick to evacuate a bunch of people and because there was a lot less radiation that went into the environment, scientists don't predict any cancers to come out.

So then what happened?

You have the accident.

And so afterwards, TEPCO, which is a company that runs the Fukushima plant, had to pump a lot of water to cool down the reactor cores.

It was more than one.

And that water did come in touch with radioactivity.

So it did get radioactive.

You know, it got contaminated.

And so they had to store all of this contaminated water in huge gallons in the property at Fukushima, the Fukushima Daiichi plant.