The video discusses the lingering impacts of two major nuclear disasters: Chernobyl and Fukushima. Despite occurring decades apart, both have left profound, long-lasting effects due to radiation exposure and the challenging cleanup efforts that remain ongoing. In Chernobyl, efforts to contain the residual radiation from the 1986 explosion continue, with an immense engineering project to permanently seal the damaged reactor. The impacted areas remain desolate and highly contaminated, affecting human and wildlife populations.

Fukushima's disaster, triggered by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, resulted in widespread contamination from the nuclear meltdown. The video highlights the disrupted lives of local populations forced to evacuate due to radiation and the difficulties of an ongoing cleanup process expected to last for decades. These events led to an enduring loss of trust in nuclear energy and government transparency, with communities continuing to face profound economic and social hardships.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. sarcophagus [sɑrˈkɑfəɡəs] - (noun) - A stone container or cast used historically to contain dead bodies; in this context, a protective barrier over a nuclear reactor. - Synonyms: (grave, tomb, vault)

In 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb, to cover the stricken reactor.

2. contamination [kənˌtæməˈneɪʃən] - (noun) - The presence of an unwanted substance that affects, damages or tarnishes purity or condition. - Synonyms: (pollution, defilement, taint)

Engineers say there’s still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination.

3. challenging [ˈʧælənʤɪŋ] - (adjective) - Something that is difficult but stimulating to do or achieve. - Synonyms: (demanding, tough, taxing)

Building the arch under these conditions is challenging enough.

4. undertaking [ˈʌndərˌteɪkɪŋ] - (noun) - A task or project that is challenging or requires effort. - Synonyms: (project, endeavor, task)

But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short, and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly.

5. evacuated [ɪˈvækjueɪtɪd] - (verb) - To remove people from a dangerous place to safety. - Synonyms: (moved, withdrawn, displaced)

The 20 miles no man's land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago.

6. gnarled [nɑːrld] - (adjective) - Knotted and twisted, often as a result of aging or injury. - Synonyms: (knotted, twisted, crooked)

Three decades later, the cleanup continues. But as this recent video shows, the reactor is still packed with poison heaps of gnarled steel and concrete.

7. sealed [siːld] - (verb) - To close an opening tightly or securely. - Synonyms: (closed, secured, shut)

When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the sarcophagus, then sealed up.

8. debris [dəˈbriː] - (noun) - Scattered fragments typically of something wrecked or destroyed. - Synonyms: (rubble, remains, wreckage)

The Soviets drafted over half a million troops to put out the fire and clear the nuclear debris.

9. catastrophe [kəˈtæs.trə.fi] - (noun) - An event causing sudden and great damage or suffering. - Synonyms: (disaster, calamity, crisis)

When you talk to your former neighbors, what do you call it? The accident, the catastrophe.

10. glowing [ˈɡloʊɪŋ] - (verb) - To produce or reflect a steady radiance of light. - Synonyms: (shining, radiating, luminescent)

This was a terrifying picture. It looked like a sunset in a distance about 100 200 yards from you. And this was the glowing core of the reactor.

Chernobyl - Fukushima - The Spill at Dan River - 60 Minutes Full Episodes

Some tragedies never end. Ask people to name a nuclear disaster and most will probably point to Fukushima in Japan three years ago. The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine was 30 years ago, but the crisis is still with us today. Thats because radiation virtually never dies after the explosion. In 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb, to cover the stricken reactor. But it wasnt meant to last very long, and it hasnt. Engineers say theres still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination. For the last five years, a massive project has been underway to seal the reactor permanently. But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short, and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly. 30 years later, Chernobyl's crippled reactor still has the power to kill. It's called the zone, and getting into it is crossing the border into one of the most contaminated places on earth. The 20 miles no man's land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago. But drive to the center of the zone today and you'll see a massive structure that appears to rise out of nowhere. It's an engineering effort the likes of which the world has never seen. With funds from over 40 different countries, 1400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor. Like a casserole, it will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium, the largest movable structure on earth. Nicholas Kai is overseeing the arch's construction. You know, when you think about it, here's this massive project going on. All these people working here, billions of dollars being spent because of one day 30 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. It was the biggest disaster of the nuclear industry. Yes.

The disaster was sparked by massive explosions that tore the roof off of Chernobyl's reactor number four, spewing radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The Soviets drafted over half a million troops to put out the fire and clear the nuclear debris. Thousands got seriously ill from radiation exposure. Three decades later, the cleanup continues. But as this recent video shows, the reactor is still packed with poison heaps of gnarled steel and concrete, pools of nuclear fuel that have hardened into a dense mass called the elephant's foot. There's still so much radiation coming from the reactor that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall. When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the sarcophagus, then sealed up. We will push it in once. The average speed will be around 10 meters an hour. So it's approximately the speed of a snail, right, but that's pretty rapid, considering the size of this thing. It is, yes, but the construction itself will have to move a lot quicker. The old plant and sarcophagus are falling apart. Just two years ago, a snowstorm caused the roof of one of the buildings to collapse, forcing workers to be evacuated and raising fears of further contamination.

Radiation is not subject to the usual rules of life and death. It is virtually eternal. When Kai took us on a tour of the site, we were fitted with dosimeters to tell us how much we were being exposed to. Suddenly, a sound we didn't want to hear. Hey, this beeper's going off. No. No, it's not. It's normal. You're sure? Yes, yes, yes, I'm definitely sure. I don't like a beeper in Chernobyl. I don't like that sound. Building the arch under these conditions is challenging enough, but some of the biggest obstacles have nothing to do with radiation. As violence gripped Ukraine this year, one of the arch's contractors backed out. The project is also $770 million short and has been plagued by repeated delays. No matter when it's completed, vast stretches of the zone will never recover. This is the city of Pripyat, 2 miles from the reactor. 30 years ago, the population was 50,000. Today it is zero.

Pripyat was where many of the plant's workers lived, grateful for their posting in a town that was the model of soviet modernity. Nine story apartment buildings lined this boulevard. They're still there, but you can't see them anymore. The forest has taken over. A vision, perhaps, of what the whole world might look like were people to just disappear. It was springtime in Pripyat that day in 1986, and an amusement park was due to open in a few days. Andrey Glukov lived here then. So that Ferris wheel never had any kids in it. Never had any kids. These bumper cars on your left had never kids on it, too. When you talk to your former neighbors, what do you call it? The accident, the catastrophe. We just call it 26, which was the date of the accident? 26. 26 of April. Sort of like the Americans call 911. Exactly. Back then, Gukhov worked for Chernobyl's nuclear safety division. He took us on a tour through a part of the plant that had not been destroyed. He was off duty that night, but what he saw when he drove past the damaged reactor was like nothing he or anyone else had ever seen. This was a terrifying picture. It looked like a sunset in a distance about 100 200 yards from you. And this was the glowing core of the reactor.

That was the first and the only time you saw it? No, that was the first time when I realized the scale of the disaster. Glukov told his family in Pripyat to stay inside and close the windows. Soviet authorities covered the area with secrecy, told people they had nothing to worry about. But 36 hours later, over a thousand buses were sent in to evacuate everyone. Authorities told people it would only be for three days. One of many lies. The people never came back, and Pripyat is being overwhelmed by the elements. One of the only things still recognizable is that old soviet iconography. Drive through the zone and you find that many villages suffer the same fate as Pripyat. A row of simple markers has been planted with the names of each one.

But amidst this wilderness, the strangest sight of all people. Just a few. Ivan Ivanovich and his wife Maria, were evacuated to an apartment block near Kiev after the accident, but couldn't take it. They weren't made for the city, so two years later, they came back. Today, there are three other people living in this village, just a few miles from the old power plant. When you decided to come back to live here, did anyone tell you it was dangerous? It's really okay here. You know, when I lived in that apartment block, I got sick all the time. But when I came back here, I was fine. And I've been fine ever since. You should never leave home. I would be long gone if I'd stayed there. I'd be in the ground. Hanabu.

Despite the danger, Tim Mousseau also chose to be here. For the last 15 years, the University of South Carolina biologists has been studying the contaminations impact from a makeshift lab inside the zone. Aren't many serious labs I've seen that look like this. Yeah, this is an opportunistic lab. It's an old villager's house. Rousseau's research has shown that the catastrophe continues to take its toll, and we're going to attempt to measure just how radioactive these mice are. What's the comparison between the amounts of radiation a mouse would have here and a mouse somewhere else? Some of these mice have on the order of 10,000 times more radioactivity in their bodies than in clean areas. The human toll has been profound as well. Thyroid cancer and leukemia affected thousands. Though the exact number of deaths is still being debated, there certainly is evidence that some of the genetic damage that occurs at the level of the DNA can be transmitted from one generation to the next. So a nuclear disaster is never over. There will be areas that will be contaminated for thousands, if not millions of years. This makes the zone like no other place on earth.

Which is why it's attracting tourists. If you've done Paris and Rome, why not try a holiday in hell? Check out the apocalypse. How did your friends react when you told them you were coming on vacation to Chernobyl? They thought it was very strange. Yeah, but, I mean, people have been coming here for a while, so I, you know. You know, I guess it must be safe. You guess it must be safe? What makes you believe it's safe? Well, you know, we'd assume that the guides wouldn't bring people here if it wasn't safe, right? Well, I hope you're right. So do I. Thousands of workers flood into the zone every day to look after what remains of the plant. Others live here year round in one of the few places safe enough for inhabitants. The town of Chernobyl itself. Yevgen Goncharenko was our guide. He lives here, too.

Why are you living here and not in Kiev? Because I like this place. For me, it's very interesting. Maybe even sacred place. A sacred place for me. Yeah. He spends much of his time writing music on his bass guitar. Music as desolate as the landscape surrounding him. As desolate as the remains of this empire that has long since disappeared. A decade after the disaster, workers here built a monument honoring their colleagues whose lives had been destroyed. The workers and the firemen made the monument themselves. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what does it say to those who saved the world? To those who saved the world. That may sound a bit hyperbolic, but when the reactor exploded in 1986, radioactive dust and debris were carried as far away as Italy and Sweden.

Until the arch finally seals up that stricken reactor, and no one knows when that might be. Something like that could happen again. Unlike other historic relics, Chernobyl does not belong to the past. Its power will never die. Chernobyl is forever. The magnitude nine earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, not only shook the ground, it shook the japanese peoples faith in their government and. And the nuclear power industry. You can see the impact of the disaster in the towns right around the plant. Only you cant get there. The earthquake did some damage. The tsunami did more. But the reason many of them are empty and off limits today is because of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima power plant next door. The whole area is now a radioactive wasteland. And the people who live there don't know if they'll ever be able to go home. Many don't know if they'll want to. Three years later, the events of March 11 darkened their lives so deeply that many speak of it simply as 311.

The hell that broke loose on March 11, 2011, was the strongest earthquake in Japan's history. When the shaking stopped the tsunami race towards shore with as much fury as nature can muster. Almost all of the more than 18,000 people who died that day on Japan's northeast coast died in the flood. The quake didn't do much damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, but the tsunami shut down the reactors. Emergency cooling systems, and they started to meltdown. Hydrogen gases inside the buildings then exploded, spreading radiation into communities more than 25 miles away. Today, in the town of Tomioka, the radiation levels are considered safe enough to allow people in during the day. Loudspeakers warn visitors that they must leave by 03:00 p.m. we were alone on the day we were there. The disaster seems to have stopped time. The clock shows 246 the moment the earthquake hit, and the damage to shops and homes looks like it could have happened yesterday.

The stack of newspapers we found were dated March 12 12th, 2011, the day after the quake and tsunami. You can see people had to leave in a hurry. That was the morning the government told people of this town and neighboring towns to get out quickly. Welcome to Okuma, says the sign population. Today, three years later, zero more than 11,000 people left town that day and never returned to. Would you ever want to go back to Okuma to live there again? Yes, I would like to before I die. Noreo Kemura lived with his wife and two daughters next door to his parents. The tsunami killed his father, his wife, and his youngest daughter, Yuna, a bright and cheerful seven year old. This is what their homes looked like before March 11, 2011. This is what's left today.

Foundations and scraps of memories that he keeps in a small box by what was once the front door. This is a shoe she was wearing that day, which was found in a heap of rubble six months after the disaster. Because of radiation, Kimura can only visit his former home ten times a year and stay only 5 hours. In February, his Allotta day came in the middle of a blizzard. On each visit, Kimura brings flowers to a small shrine he built to honor his family. There were among the 111 people who died in Okuma that day. The remains of 110 have been recovered. The only one still missing is Nori Okimura's daughter, Yuna. Ten times a year, he goes back home to search for her. On Saturday, you were digging again in Okuma. It was snowing. It was freezing. Why? To find Yuna, of course. And also, if I stop searching or gathering her things, I will lose the connection with her.

To be honest, the reason why I can live my life every day is because I have to find her and her things. I need to do this to keep my sanity. Volunteers now help Kimura dig through the piles of debris left by the tsunami. Everyone is dressed in protective clothing to limit their exposure to radiation. The digging seems futile, but on this day, Kimura unearthed clothing he says belonged to his surviving daughter, Mayu. On March 11, the day of the tsunami, Kimura made a mistake for which he will never forgive himself. He was at work on a farm, and he stayed there. Did you think then that there would be a tsunami? There was a radio at my work, and my boss told me that the tsunami was going to be 3 meters tall. My house is five to 6 meters above sea level, so I was convinced that our home would be fine and didn't worry about it after that at all.

Do you think there's anything you could have done to save your family? I should have gone home right away. I regret believing the information easily while my family was in life threatening danger. Even now, I say to myself, what was I thinking? When radiation forced the evacuation of Okuma, the town leader told Norio Kimura to stop searching for the missing and start caring for the living. Sahina's daughter moved here to the Japanese Alps, where the brisk air and the snow capped mountains made radiation and tsunamis difficult to imagine. Kimura has traded farming for a guesthouse he's planning to open. His daughter Mayu talks about her mother more than her missing sister, and doesn't ask why her father continues searching for her. Their new mountain home is 2000ft above the perils of the sea and 180 miles from the Fukushima plant. Ghost towns surround the plant now, but three years later, there are still more than 4000 workers there, all of them wearing layers of protection.

Because of the exposure to radiation, the men in this building are only allowed to work two and a half hours a day. Theyre not producing any electricity. Theyre just cleaning up. Were TepcO workers adequately trained to handle the emergency? I don't think so. Within months of the accident, Yuichi Funabashi, a former newspaper editor, headed an investigation into what went wrong and why. It was the only investigation not sponsored by the government, and its conclusions were brutal. I was very much concerned about the government not telling the truth to the public. The revelations in Funabashi's report added to the public's anger and dismay. He wrote that from the beginning, the government had conspired with the industry to convince people that nuclear power is safe. So the government effort at the time was to convince people that there was nothing to worry about. Exactly. Nothing to worry about. Don't worry. Okay. Even don't prepare for that, the severe accident, okay?

Because that would cause that unnecessary unease and unnecessary misunderstanding, and there's no reason to prepare. No reason to prepare. So this avoidance ultimately translated into unpreparedness. Mother Nature threw a real curveball to the Japanese with that huge tsunami last year, TePco hired american nuclear engineer Lake Barrett as an advisor. Barrett directed the cleanup at the three Mile island nuclear plant after its accident in 1979. It's estimated that the cleanup is going to take 30 to 40 years. To a layman, that sounds very, very long to me. That's not long at all. That's what I would expect for that kind of thing. It's a huge challenge. It's a big on site mess that they have to clean up, and it's going to take them decades to do it. It took us ten years to do three Mile island, and three Mile island accident was much simpler than they have at Fukushima.

Are they where you thought they would be three years later? I'd hope they'd be further along. It's been challenging technically. It's been challenging culturally and politically for them, but they're making good progress now. Sounds like you're being a little diplomatic. Well, decision making process in Japan is complicated. Decision making in Japan requires consensus, and reaching consensus often takes a very long time. The most difficult job will be to dismantle the melted reactors, but radiation is too high for workers to get there. For now, Tepco is inundated with groundwater that leaks into the reactors and gets contaminated. Every day, 100,000 gallons of radioactive water has to be pumped out before it reaches the ocean. TePcO is filling storage tanks almost as fast as it can build them, and they're notorious for leaking. Another enormous cleanup is happening outside the plant. Entire communities are being cleared of contaminated materials that will have to be stored for generations. This part of Japan is known for its agriculture, but the only crop growing now is the multitude of black bags holding the radioactive waste filling the empty spaces in towns like Okoma. Now, some of the kids from Okoma live and go to school 70 miles away.

How many of you would like to go back to Okuma? Everybody. How many of you think you will go back to Okuma? What's keeping you from going back to? You can tell me, because there is a lot of radiation. There's a lot of radioactive material there. These kids will be middle aged before the cleanup is finished. Their homes could have been rebuilt quickly if it had just been an earthquake and a tsunami. It's the man made disaster which will take decades to repair. This is the class that Norio Kimura's daughter you now would have been in if she were alive. Her friend Kurea remembers. They ate lunch together. Where is she now? Okay. In Okima. She's lonely being alone in the town of Okima all this time. I think she must be lonely. About a third of the residents from Okama decided to stick together and moved into what the government called temporary housing. Temporary is lasting a long time. The three generations of Kimuras that once lived together are now split apart. Norio and his daughter live in Nagano, 5 hours away from his mother to Moe.

She lives in the temporary housing alone in a cold and cramped room furnished with photographs. The kimuras, like many Japanese, have a strong connection to their dead and feel obliged to help them be at peace. As long as the dead are in limbo, so are the living. You've lost so much of your family. Why aren't you together with your son now? I'm with my husband's ashes now. Once I find a proper place to put him, I'd like to go to Nagano. What do you think the right place will be? Our family cemetery in Okoma is contaminated with radiation now. I could come back two or three times a year to burn incense for him, but my grandchild would not be able to come. I don't want to keep him or his grandchild, whom he used to adore so much, can't even come to visit. Ten times a year, Norio Kimura visits his ancestors in the family cemetery, a place where he thought he would be laid to rest one day and where his children would come to visit him. But he won't find any peace, he says, until after he finds Yuna.

Do you think there's any chance you'll ever find your daughter? I know that the chance is very slim, but no matter how slim the chance is, I still cannot stop. From the outside looking in, I know that this is very unlikely, but I still can't stop, even if I cannot ever find her.

Nuclear Disaster, Nuclear Energy, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Innovation, Global, 60 Minutes