What if I told you that peaches grown around the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, site of Japan’s catastrophic nuclear accident, were on sale at Harrods, the luxury department store in London where Ronald Reagan once inquired about buying a baby elephant?
It's true, and how those peaches got there is as much a story of clever marketing as how the people of Fukushima prefecture, marred by the 2011 disaster, are trying to disentangle their region from its nuclear legacy.
Most people in the U.S. associate peaches with Georgia. But before the nuclear accident, the prefecture, nestled in a traditional, picturesque part of northeast Japan, had been a thriving agricultural hub, earning the nickname “The Fruit Kingdom.”
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
But this all changed on March 11, 2011, when the most powerful recorded earthquake in Japanese history triggered a tsunami, 50 feet (15 meters) in height, that hit one of the region’s nuclear power plants, flooding it. Three active nuclear reactors lost power. Without their cooling systems, the cores of the reactors overheated and partially melted. This damaged the reactors’ containment vessels, causing an explosion. As toxic radioactive materials burst out, permeating soil, water, air and foliage, the prefectural government declared a danger zone 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) in radius around the plant. Fallout patterns then prompted adding an area of 80 square mi (207 sq km)—about the size of Seattle—to the zone. As of early 2022, the official death count from the earthquake, tsunami and related effects was nearly 20,000, but it could be higher. At least one person who was exposed to radiation ultimately died from cancer.*
According to the severity scale of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Fukushima emergency was a level 7, equivalent to Chernobyl. The Fukushima countryside was no longer a fruit kingdom, and its farmers’ livelihoods were in tatters.
So imagine my surprise when, 13 years later, I saw photos of employees at Harrods’ food hall handing out samples of peaches grown in Fukushima to shoppers, who were apparently willing to give them a taste. If your gut reaction is probably something like “I wouldn’t try one of those radioactive peaches if you paid me,” no one would blame you; that was my initial reaction, too.
Questions started swirling in my head: How could fruit grown in this region possibly be safe? How were these peaches allowed to be exported? Could these radioactive peaches birth a new superhero?
A radioactive reputation can be difficult to shake. If I offered you a peach grown in Chernobyl, which has had 38 years to recover, would you take it? What about food grown at Three Mile Island? That explosion was nearly 45 years ago. Probably not, right? But why is this?
One of the main reasons nuclear power has a bad reputation is its unfortunate genesis; before splitting atoms for public energy, scientists split them for warfare. When a similar technique was used for generating power a few years later, and when nuclear power plants began operating commercially from 1954 onwards, the public did not see the energy released by radioactive decay as a new, extremely efficient power source; they saw it as something capable of wiping out cities and instantly incinerating people, while leaving insidious contamination in its wake.
Antinuclear movements spread across the world in the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting growing public trepidation about both nuclear weapons and power. Nuclear power also lost popularity because of its high costs and concerns about nuclear waste disposal and workplace safety. But many governments ignored protests and built plants anyway, including Japan (Fukushima Daiichi was constructed in 1967). Despite its brutal experience of nuclear war, the country chose nuclear energy to help facilitate its economic growth and energy self-sufficiency. Many governments were also aware of the need to keep up with developing nuclear technologies, both to symbolize their country’s technical expertise and in case the practical knowledge of nuclear fission ever came in handy in the future.
When the failures at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl happened, however, many of the wider public’s nuclear fears were confirmed. Research has shown that nuclear power has failed to shed its association with death, hazard and weapons, even in more recent decades. I’ve met many physicists who are careful not to advertise they work in the nuclear field because of this lingering stigma.
Compared to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, though, Fukushima had the benefit of 30 years of technological advances to aid its cleanup mission. Immediately after the accident, a few hundred workers took turns in groups of 50 to try and stabilize the plant and reduce radioactive leakage.
Once stabilized, the cleanup began, with the plant’s operators, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (or TEPCO), partially owned by the Japanese government, decommissioned the plant to remove all remaining radioactive material. Workers bagged contaminated materials for safe disposal, and contaminated water was stored for later release, counting on it decaying further. TEPCO would later make use of robotic technology, including the ALPS system, to aid their decontamination efforts. The affected surrounding area also quickly became subject to strict monitoring, with scientists using equipment like EPA’s RadNet, to test air and soil radioactivity levels and observe the rate of decay. An array of radioactive substances had been released during the disaster, including plutonium and uranium, but scientists were also on the lookout for harmful levels of radioactive cesium and iodine isotopes, which turned out to be the abundant and far-reaching contaminants of agricultural land.
Many Japanese people and onlookers from around the world were sure that the agricultural land of Fukushima prefecture would be out of use for decades. But as soon as July 2011, researchers were coming out with surprising claims—the soil in Fukushima was safe, they announced. This was despite the decay half-life of cesium-137—one of the main contaminating isotopes—being about 30 years. The scientists’ analysis had shown that, instead of penetrating deep into the soil as feared, the radioactive contamination had only seemed to affect about two inches of the top layer of soil, and accumulated on already-grown crops.
Scoop out the bad soil and get rid of the bad crops, they said, and the food grown in Fukushima would likely be safe. They did precisely this, significantly reducing soil contamination and allowing residents to return to their homes. This is in sharp contrast to Chernobyl, where surrounding areas were completely deserted and reduced to ghost towns, many of which remain abandoned to this day.
A local agricultural facility was adapted, and in September 2011 it began testing produce samples for radiation. Today the facility holds a radiation testing unit; to me, it seems that the food passing through here, including yields of peaches like those being sold at Harrods, is probably the most thoroughly examined in the world. Germanium semiconductor detectors, radioactive cesium concentration detectors, sodium iodide scintillation spectrometers and more scan the produce for any signs of radioactivity. The nationally approved testing process is held to the strict threshold standards of 100 Becquerel per kilogram of food item—which is a mere tenth of the internationally recognized CODEX threshold of 1,000 Bq/kg, and far less radiation than the U.S. standard of 1,200 Bq/kg. Food from Fukushima is also subjected to monitoring and testing by the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, to ensure safe standards.
In 2017, 6 years after the disaster, the government of Japan said that Fukushima foods were “safe and delicious”, backing up the brusque statement with numerous data and endorsements from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and IAEA officials, the main global bodies who have assisted the government in monitoring the contamination.
According to data presented by the Japanese government, agricultural soil in Fukushima purportedly had comparable radiation “dose rates” to soil in New York, London, Hong Kong and Seoul, as of 2017 to 2018, because radiation occurs naturally. The Fukushima peaches would therefore be no more radioactively contaminated than those grown in a London back garden. Soil in the U.S. can also become contaminated from natural radionuclides and even from nuclear weapons testing, but fruit grown in the U.S. has far lower safety thresholds and less radioactivity testing procedures compared to that coming from Fukushima. And yet we all eat it.
Internationally, it took another few years before governments began respecting scientists’ findings. In 2021 the FDA agreed that, according to their “standard surveillance and sampling measures,” food imported to the U.S. from Fukushima posed no food safety risk to consumers. They followed up in 2023 by testing 51 samples from the area and found that none contained “detectable levels of cesium.” The U.K. also lifted its own restrictions on Fukushima imports two years ago. Owing to international protocols, the food was safe for import and consumption.
But would consumers agree? This is where Harrods comes in. The Japanese government and TEPCO—the owners of the devastated power plant—have been heavily pushing their reputation-building initiative. Associate peaches with Harrods, a place the royal family is known to frequent, and maybe they become a delicacy, an interesting snack to bring out at a dinner party, rather than something to be afraid of.
And their price tag reflects this. They cost nearly $33 a piece—while an average Georgia peach in the U.S. costs less than $1. By selling here, they might just be fast-tracking their fruit to a better reputation, one which embraces the uniqueness of its origin, the weirdness of it, rather than perpetuating fear.
Regardless of the cost of these peaches, the region is urging the world to not leave them in a ruinous past. This is commendable.
When I first heard about the peaches, my gut instinct was “no, thank you.” But now I realize that Fukushima food has been tested within an inch of its life—and likely mine. I trust the science on this one, regardless of all the negative nuclear associations. So, now, will I try one? Yes, if they’re still giving out free samples—as $33 for a peach, however safe, is terribly indulgent.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
*Editor’s Note (10/17/24): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the description of estimated deaths.