The fifty of Fukushima

The Fukushima fifty, referring to the workers who remained inside the nuclear power plant after the March 2011 tsunami, were actually sixty-nine workers. The round number made for a more attractive headline. Fifteen years after that great catastrophe that caused more than twenty thousand deaths, a documentary pays tribute to that team. They acted convinced that risking their own lives was a debt they owed to the citizens. But the disappointment with Tepco's negligence meant that Japanese society did not perceive them as heroes.

Fukushima: A nuclear nightmare (Movistar+) is a documentary that recounts everything that happened at the nuclear power plant after the tsunami. It features the engineers who faced the emergency, the specialists who advised them, the firefighters who participated in cooling the reactors, the assistants to the political authorities, and analysts of that disaster. It is not a very different story from those we have already seen in other documentaries about nuclear catastrophes. In fact, the director, James Jones, previously directed the magnificent documentary Chernobyl: The lost tapes. Knowing similar cases makes the viewer anticipate events. You are almost waiting for the moment when the protagonists managing the catastrophe will assume the arrival of the worst. In Fukushima: A nuclear nightmare this moment arrives quickly, and the way it was decided who would be part of the sacrifice squad is shocking. The existing social and cultural trauma in Japan with everything related to atomic energy emerges in the narrative.

Interviews are alternated with archival footage of the earthquake, the tsunami, and its consequences on the nuclear power plant. Recreations are also included to explain the communication difficulties faced from the control room. Of course, there is no shortage of footage recorded by the engineers and operators themselves who filmed their journey through the guts of the large nuclear building, through the bowels of the reactors, trying to find a solution that would minimize the tragedy. These are always the most distressing sequences. The narrative avoids detailing the health repercussions for those sixty-nine workers who resisted until the last moment. Group photographs remain, taken to document their resistance. The script focuses on the entire emergency process and leaves Tepco's malpractice and irresponsibilities for the end. Fukushima's facilities were not prepared for the impact of a tsunami: "They did not prepare because acknowledging the risk of a tsunami went against orthodoxy, against the myth of safety." The conclusions question whether nuclear energy should be in the hands of private companies that prioritize profit. "More than a human error, we can say it was human behavior that influenced it," concludes one of the witnesses. A documentary that, beyond Fukushima, forces us to ask who manages the common good and to what extent our well-being is in the hands of powers we often do not even know.