Pope Francis has met with victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and called for the world to rethink its reliance on nuclear power.
Pope Francis recalled on Monday that Japan’s Catholic bishops called for the abolition of nuclear power plants in the aftermath of the “triple disaster,” in which three Fukushima reactors melted down after an earthquake triggered a tsunami.
This photo taken Monday, Jan. 19, 2015 and provided by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) shows a water storage tank, center, which a worker fell into, at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan. A worker at Japan's wrecked nuclear power plant died early Tuesday after falling into the water storage tank, the latest in a growing number of accidents at the site still struggling to clean up the mess from the 2011 Fukushima disaster. (AP Photo/Tokyo Electric Power Co. )
The meltdown coated the area in radioactive fallout and at one point forced the displacement of 160,000 people. Nine years later more than 40,000 people still can’t return home.
Pope Francis didn’t make the call to abolish nuclear power in his speech before victims. But he made clear that “important decisions will have to be made about the use of natural resources, and future energy sources in particular.”
