NUKI LEAKS

Professional surfer Takayuki Wakita moved with his family to Hawaii after the Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011. Five years later, he worries about the ongoing threats of contamination in the ocean.

You might think of professional big-wave rider Takayuki Wakita, whose roots trace back Shonan, Japan—a stretch of coast that many consider his country’s birthplace for surfing—as a radiation refugee.

Five years ago on March 11, Japan was shaken to its core by the now-infamous 9.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred about 45 miles out to sea. Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear power plant was smack dab in the middle of the disaster zone, not far from where Wakita was living part-time with his family in the coastal town of Chiba. The city was about 180 miles south of Fukushima and situated closely to many of his favorite surf spots.

At the time, he and his wife, Sayuri, along with their two young children, Taichi and Sara, were spending half of the year on Hawaii’s North Shore, where Wakita had earned his place over the previous two decades as one of Pipeline’s most respected surfers. The whole family happened to be back in Japan that month for one of the children’s graduation ceremony.

As the earthquake violently shook the ground under Wakita’s feet that day, a gargantuan slab of seafloor—50 miles wide and four times as long—was being shaken loose, lifted up, and then dropped back down, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. One hour later, a tsunami of epic proportions, bearing 60- to 100-foot waves—not the kind Wakita likes—pummeled the coastline, wiping out entire communities as well as the Daiichi power plant’s nuclear reactors, causing a full meltdown and surge of radioactive contamination to flow directly into the North Pacific. Wakita managed to secure his family before the tsunami struck and retreat to higher ground, he says, though tens of thousands of people were not as lucky. In the immediate aftermath, Wakita’s family relocated to his hometown of Shonan, where they experienced aftershocks for several weeks.

One month later, with his house in Chiba flooded and quarantined by the Japanese government due to radiation levels, Wakita and his family were en route to a new life: full-time on Oahu, where he now teaches surfing at the North Shore Surf Shop. He was an invitee earlier this year to The Eddie, Quiksilver’s big-wave competition in memory of Eddie Aikau.

“My son and daughter were wanting to surf almost every day [back in Japan], and I was worried about the radiation in the ocean,” Wakita says. ”I did not want to raise them there and take that risk. … When we found out that the Fukushima power plant exploded, we didn’t even know about the radiation. But it has contaminated the water there, [and is] still leaking. We still don’t know [how bad it is], because there’s no coloration, 

no smell.”

In that sense, radiation is an enigmatic type of threat, and one whose range of potential to cause harm is extremely broad, according to Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

Right after the tsunami and reactor meltdown in Fukushima, radiation levels of Cesium in the nearby ocean peaked at 50 millions times higher than they were prior, and reduced in the subsequent weeks and months to tens of millions of times higher levels, Buesseler says. Now, five years later, those levels have dropped near the reactor in Japan to between several hundred and about a thousand times higher than normal, indicating on-going leakage, though not nearly as bad as it was in 2011.

Of the many types of radiation that were released into the ocean following the accident, Cesium-137 was one of the most abundant and radioactive isotopes that flowed into the sea. Cesium, which has a half-life of about 30 years, is one of the most problematic forms of radiation because of its high solubility, which allows it to spread easily through water.

Buesseler notes that low levels of radiation are present in all oceans, which is not sufficient to cause any measurable harm for sea life or humans.

“One way of describing the difference in Cesium in the ocean currently verses, say, in Japan at the peak five years ago, is like the difference between temperature on Earth and the temperature at core of the sun,” he says.

Back in 2014, concern about radiation from the Daiichi disaster reaching California’s shores spurred Santa Cruz Waves to team up with activist group Beyond Radiation to gather water samples from the waters at Pleasure Point and send them off to WHOI for testing. The results deemed that radionuclides released from Fukushima had not reached Santa Cruz “yet.”

Based on the levels of radiation that WHOI has detected in the Pacific in recent months, Buesseler states that if a surfer were to get into the ocean for six hours every day for a whole year, the amount of radiation they would be exposed to presents a risk approximately 1,000 times smaller than a single X-ray at the dentist.

Much of the radiation present in the environment today—which measures predominantly in the single digits—is fallout from nuclear testing during the 1950s and ‘60s and a disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine in 1986, which released close to 10 times the radiation as the Daiichi power plant.

“Now, if you got into the millions [of becquerels per cubic meter, the unit of measure for radiation], I would stay out of the water,” Buesseler says. “If it were in the thousands, I might be concerned about eating the fish.”

Buesseler goes on to say that, though the actual threat of radiation drifting across the ocean in potent-enough quantities to cause any harm is minimal, there are warranted concerns about contamination spreading.

The melted cores at the power plant are still highly radioactive, requiring massive amounts of cold sea water to keep the fuel from overheating and melting again, he says. That sea water has been draining down below the power plant and mixing with ground water, which is flowing back into the sea. To stem the ongoing flow of radioactive water into the sea, the power plant’s owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been collecting the used coolant and storing it in 10-meter-tall steel tanks all over the Daiichi property. So far, the tanks contain approximately 750,000 tons of contaminated water.

Buesseler says he worries that, because Japan continues to be a seismically active area, and because there is so much radioactive material on site, another earthquake could release much more contamination into the environment.

Wakita says he is also very concerned about the contaminated tank water at the power plant and how the Japanese government might dispose of it.

“The ocean water there has so much radiation, and every day they flush [the power plant] out,” he says.

Due to what Wakita calls a major lack of transparency from the government and TEPCO with the people of Japan, he worries that they will reach a capacity with tank storage and possibly release it directly into the ocean.

“The Japanese government has tried to distract the Japanese people from the issues of radiation,” he says. “They don’t report exactly what’s going on the headline news. So many people back in Japan have already forgotten about it, so that’s really weird to me. But nothing is really changing.”

While authorities and the scientific community report contamination to be at non-harmful levels for humans, Wakita says he still worries about the possible longterm effects of exposure, which he feels are unknowable.

“Maybe these things don’t come out in some way for a long time, even the next generation,” he says.

Much of the surfing culture has been dampened in Japan due to the Fukushima disaster, and he says that many of his surfer friends worry about getting in the water at their local breaks around Chiba and Shohan. But for many of them, he adds, the prospect of not surfing is much worse than the perceived harm radioactivity could cause.

“They know it’s not good for the body, but they also feel more stress over not surfing, not getting into the ocean. They need to surf,” Wakita says.

While he is deeply saddened by what has happened in Japan and the environment, Wakita says that his heart is still with his country.

“I still love Japan, and it is my home,” he says, “but my soul is in Hawaii now.”