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Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tim Alberta: The thrill of defeat The metaphor that explains why America needs to prosecute Trump There’s a word for blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. What were the Russians doing in Chornobyl?

Layered Repression

Almost two years ago, I engaged in a thought experiment about what the failure of democracy in the United States might look like. I wrote it for an Atlantic subscriber newsletter I had back then, and I hope you’ll forgive me for revisiting it, but after a summer in which American democracy has been walking a tightrope over the authoritarian chasm, it’s worth looking back to see how we’ve done since early 2022.

The most important point, and the one that I think bears repeating, is that the failure of democracy in America will not look like a scene from a movie, where some fascist in a black tunic ascends the steps of the Capitol on Inauguration Day and proclaims the end of freedom:

The collapse of democracy in the United States will look more like an unspooling or an unwinding rather than some dramatic installation of Gilead or Oceania. My guess—and again, this is just my stab at speculative dystopianism—is that it will be a federal breakdown that returns us to the late 1950s in all of the worst ways.

We’re already seeing this unwinding in slow motion. Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach.

They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public.

Trump and his supporters are not even coy about some of these ideas. The Heritage Foundation—once a powerhouse think tank on the right that has since collapsed into unhinged extremism and admiration for foreign strongmen—has a “Project 2025” posted on its website, with sections that read like extended Facebook comments. I took a look so that you don’t have to, including at a policy-guide chapter on the military authored by former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Heritage and Miller (a seat warmer brought in by Trump at the tail end of his administration) think it’s very important for the next president—I wonder who they could possibly have in mind—to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” and to reinstate personnel dismissed for disobeying orders to get vaccinated.

Also:

Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.

Why not just write up a loyalty oath to Trump? Little wonder that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up the promotion of some 300 senior officers; perhaps it’s occurred to him (or others) that sitting on those promotions until 2025 might open the door for Heritage’s unnamed next U.S. president to sweep out the Marxist gender theorists and replace them with “real Americans” who know that their duty is to a man rather than a moldering document in the National Archives.

The rest of Project 2025 is a lot of putative big-think from wannabe conservative intellectuals such as Ken Cuccinelli, Ben Carson, Stephen Moore, and Peter Navarro (who is currently on trial for contempt of Congress). Much of this stuff is nonsense, of course, but it’ll be nonsense right up until the point it isn’t: These are all names that would reappear in a second Trump administration, and this time, they’d move a lot faster in breaking down the federal guardrails around democracy.

This layered state, federal, and local repression is what I worried about back in early 2022:

This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance. If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule. (And arresting seditionists? Good luck with that. I expect that if Trump is reelected, he will pardon everyone involved with January 6.)

Trump, of course, has since made the promise to drop pardons like gentle rain from the sky. America’s democratic immune system, however, is for now still functioning. The courts have done their duty even when elected officials have refused to do theirs. (Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be right now if the Senate had convicted Trump in his second impeachment. Alas.) Trump is now under indictment for 91 alleged crimes, and Jack Smith seems undaunted in his pursuit of justice.

Likewise, the major ringleaders of January 6—all but one, I should say—have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, among other crimes, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some of these supposed tough guys ended up blubbering and pleading for mercy in a federal courtroom, but to no avail. The would-be Oath Keepers centurion Stewart Rhodes and a leader of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, each got 18 years, a record broken yesterday when a Trump-appointed federal judge sent the ex–Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio inside for 22 years, meaning he will be sitting out the next five presidential elections.

This is the good news, but none of it will matter if Trump returns to the White House.

I shouldn’t end on such a dire note. Trump is the likely nominee, and although I still feel a chill about the threat of authoritarianism, I also can’t shake the feeling that most Americans in most states want no part of this ongoing madness. I still have faith that most people, when faced with the choice, will continue to support the constitutional freedoms of the United States—but only if they understand how endangered those freedoms are.

Related:

The former Proud Boys leader finds out. Is Tennessee a democracy?

Today’s News

A Russian missile strike killed at least 17 people and injured dozens of others in Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials. A federal judge found Donald Trump liable for making defamatory statements against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, carrying over a federal jury’s verdict in a related defamation case earlier this year. Trump has appealed the jury’s verdict. Delta Air Lines announced that it is bringing Tom Brady on board as a strategic adviser.

Evening Read

Photograph by Erik Paul Howard for The Atlantic

Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a chunky cellphone to his ear. He was making plans and talking about girls, riffing in his lisped woof of a voice. He laughed and brought a square of rolling paper, full of pot leaves, to his lips.

From behind the camera, hampton asked whether he intended to consume their entire bag of weed. Annoyed at the interruption, Biggie mocked her question. Hampton’s voice turned sharp. “Why are you going at me today?” she asked. “What’s the problem? Do we need to do something before we go on the road? Take this outside?” The video cut to static.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Robots are already killing people. America could be in for a rough fall. Women have been surfing for centuries. The taint of nuclear disaster doesn’t wash away.

Culture Break

Gabriela Herman / Gallery Stock

Read. These six books are correctives to isolation.

Watch. D.P., on Netflix, is a compelling K-drama without a drop of romance.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I voted yesterday in Rhode Island, where our district had a special primary election to choose contenders to replace resigning Representative David Cicilline. Rhode Island CD 1 is a heavily Democratic district (it went for Joe Biden in 2020 by 29 points), so the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to prevail in the general election. Yesterday’s Democratic winner was Gabe Amo, a young man who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations. Amo is Black, and if he goes to Washington, he’ll be the first person of color to represent Rhode Island in Congress.

But what fascinated me yesterday was that we all voted in Rhode Island CD 1 without having much of an idea who was likely to win. For various reasons, including the short run-up to the primary, none of the local media outlets or universities did any polling. Twelve candidates, including several Rhode Island elected officials, ran in the primary. A few looked to be prohibitive favorites early on; one was felled at the last minute by scandal. Another, Aaron Regunberg, seemed to be ubiquitous on the airwaves, with ads touting his endorsement from Bernie Sanders. (Probably not a great idea in Rhode Island; Regunberg came in second but ran more than seven points behind Amo.)

I often say that people should vote as if their one vote will make the difference; for once, I walked into the booth with the thought that my vote could, in fact, be the deciding vote. As a political junkie, I love polls, but it was nice to be able to cast a ballot without knowing whether my preferred candidate was the likely winner or loser.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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Daniil Medvedev says "one player is going to die" because of the hot conditions on court as he beats Andrey Rublev in the US Open quarter-finals.

The new US aid would include HIMARS missile systems, Javelin weapons, Abrams tanks as well as humanitarian assistance.

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On Labor Day, you could drive from Minnesota’s border with Canada all the way to where Louisiana hits the Gulf of Mexico and not encounter a high under 90 degrees. The heat hasn’t broken: Today, nearly a third of Americans are sweltering under heat alerts.

Such weather is a fitting end to a devastating season, the kind you run out of superlatives for. This summer, climate extremes suddenly seemed to be everywhere, all at once. It was the world’s hottest June since humans started keeping track. July was even worse. Phoenix—which averaged 102 degrees in July—got so hot that people received third-degree burns from touching doorknobs. In Iowa, livestock dropped dead in their pens. The disasters weren’t limited to heat: Canadian wildfires blanketed large swaths of the United States in smoke, flash floods thundered through Vermont, and wildfires reduced parts of Maui to rubble.

Pumpkin spice is already back on the Starbucks menu, but fall isn’t poised to provide a respite. El Niño, the warm phase of a naturally recurring cycle that can wreak havoc on global weather patterns, has officially returned—and it’s predicted to be a strong one. The southern U.S. will likely be wetter, while forecasts are for a warm winter in the North. These cycles always have some variability, but experts say that the climate crisis has now raised temperatures to the extent that they may also amplify El Niño. This summer has shown starkly how climate change can supercharge the weather. This fall, El Niño could further magnify the problem.

Although El Niño technically started in June, it likely didn’t contribute much to this summer’s extremes. That was the climate crisis. Across the U.S., hundreds of temperature records fell. Kansas City’s heat index approached that of Death Valley. Chicago had to reduce its trains’ speeds because high temperatures stressed the tracks. “Historically, El Niño events during the summer have very little impact over the United States,” Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “Climate change, however, is having an impact.” Scientists once hesitated to say how global warming might worsen weather. Now they can accurately measure just how much climate contributes to events such as heat waves. An international team of researchers found that climate change made July’s heat waves in the U.S., Europe, and China hotter by as much as 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as a result of climate change.

After this summer’s extremes, it’s daunting to be entering the height of an El Niño cycle. Typically, because of the direction the world spins, winds move from east to west across the tropics. This blows warm surface water away from South America, where colder water swells up to replace it. But every two to seven years, these winds weaken and more warm water remains along the Americas—producing El Niño. (When the winds strengthen, you get its counterpart, La Niña.) The Pacific Ocean is huge, covering a third of the Earth, so these cycles can cause dramatic variations in global storms and droughts. That’s why L’Heureux calls El Niño “the Great Nudger.” As she explains, “It nudges atmospheric patterns over the globe in certain directions that cause weather patterns to reoccur.”

Unlike during La Niña, when a cooler ocean can absorb more heat, El Niño basically acts as a temporary boost to global warming—bumping global temperatures up by around a tenth of a degree Celsius, or roughly 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit. The effects, however, vary by location: Some places become colder, while others become much warmer. A strong El Niño during the winter of 1997–98, for example, caused flooding in California, while Indonesia and the Philippines suffered under a severe drought. In 2016, another record El Niño contributed to what is still officially the world’s warmest year on record; NOAA estimates it raised the annual global temperature 0.12 degrees Celsius, or 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit, above average.

The influence of El Niño is also potentially intensifying because of climate change. Warmer air holds more moisture, setting the stage for more extreme precipitation; likewise, hotter temperatures may worsen the drought conditions it already tends to bring to some locations. “El Niño impacts do not work in isolation anymore. There’s always a climate component,” L’Heureux said.

Unless you’re a mosquito in New Mexico, that is not good news for the fall and winter. Right now, satellites, sensors, and models suggest that ocean temperatures are gradually increasing, as the cycle gathers strength. El Niño’s impacts will be most visible later this fall and into winter 2024. (It’s called El Niño, or “little boy” in Spanish, after the newborn Christ, because the cycle tends to peak around Christmas.) At that point, much of the southern U.S. will likely see wetter conditions. Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest is predicted to be drier, while the northern part of the country may have a balmy winter. “Because it’s a climate forecast, and we can’t say anything definitively, we put probabilities on everything,” L’Heureux said.

Based on past El Niños, the U.S. may be in for more climate extremes. In 1997–98, for example, California saw 150 percent of its normal rainfall, washing away roads and producing deadly, home-destroying mudslides. The Midwest practically had no winter, with some areas experiencing average temperatures 12 degrees warmer than in a normal year. Some may cheer a milder fall and winter, but that might also heighten the risk of troubling heat deeper into September and October. And warmer temperatures could set the stage for worse wildfires next summer. That’s not to mention all the other downstream effects from knocking normal patterns out of whack. In 2016, for example, a cool, wet spring was great for fleas and other disease-carrying insects, increasing cases of plague and West Nile in the Southwest. Going back to 1982–83, unseasonable heat in Alaska was likely behind the reduced salmon harvest, while warmer waters caused a rash of shark bites off the Oregon coast.

Nor, of course, is El Niño merely a U.S.-specific problem. Just like with climate change, developing countries are often hit the hardest. Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, warned that as a result of El Niño, the coming months may have “far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment.” The sum total of heat could cause global temperatures to surge past an infamous benchmark—1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial era, topping records set during the last El Niño in 2016.

L’Heureux leads NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, and her team predicts that El Niño has a more than 95 percent chance of lasting through February 2024. After that, it’s hard to say. El Niños typically persist for about a year, but the exact timing and intensity of each cycle can vary. In a warmer future, El Niños may stretch longer. A recent Nature paper suggests there’s some early evidence that the transitions between El Niño and La Niña phases may be slowing down—which means that the conditions associated with them could stick around. The Pacific Walker Circulation, a massive atmospheric loop over much of the tropics, helps dictate these transitions, and many models project that climate change will weaken this loop. As a result, “instead of single years of El Niño or La Niña conditions, we may experience more multiyear events,” says Georgina Falster, the paper’s lead author. Think extended droughts, more summers with weeks-long heat waves.

These are complicated systems, and many parts of the El Niño cycle still aren’t well understood. But figuring out how these cycles may be changing is important, because climate models rely on our best attempt at describing current conditions in order to make assumptions about how the world might change. If the assumptions aren’t accurate, they could alter our forecasts for climate impacts. “There’s a lot of uncertainty” with these models, L’Heureux said. That’s true of how we experience climate change too. The weather in any given year can have a lot of variability, a point Senator James Inhofe’s congressional snowball accidentally made. Climate change may not always feel linear—this past summer, its impacts felt like they fast-forwarded. A hot winter, fueled in part by El Niño, doesn’t necessarily mean next summer will be even worse. But in the long term, the trend of higher temperatures is undebatable.

Disconcertingly, this is all still just the overture to a world that looks very different from the one we’ve known to date. Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me that by the time her young children are in their 40s, “they won’t have a summer as cool as the summer has been.” Though researchers have predicted dire climate consequences for decades, many of the scientists I’ve spoken with this summer have wrestled with how to feel about the recent drumbeat of broken records. For her part, LeGrande has been coping by bingeing survival shows like Alone that drop contestants in the wilderness to see how long they can withstand the elements—a cinematic version of the shifting reality many are already starting to face off-screen.

No matter how much you study or read about the climate crisis, it hits differently when you have to confront it every time you walk outside. After this summer’s strangeness, the science may be complicated, but the conclusion is simple: Even when this El Niño dissipates and the world returns to a cooler phase, it won’t be enough to counteract the march toward a hothouse Earth. Only we can do that.

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With four separate criminal cases moving forward against Donald Trump, the rule of law in America appears both commanding and startlingly fragile. Small scenes at courthouses from Florida to New York underline the ever-present threat of violence. In Fulton County, Georgia, officials set up bright-orange security barriers around the courthouse in advance of Trump’s indictment there. In Washington, D.C., fences and yellow tape surrounded the U.S. district court. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will oversee the federal case against Trump for his efforts to overturn the election, has received increased protection from U.S. marshals—and perhaps not a moment too soon, as a Texas woman was recently arrested for calling in death threats against the judge. Trump, meanwhile, has been busy attacking Chutkan and other judges on social media, smearing the prosecutors bringing the cases against him as a “fraud squad” doing the bidding of President Joe Biden, and promising to turn the Justice Department against his foes should he win a second term.

It’s a grim picture. “The next 18 months could further undermine confidence in democracy and the rule of law,” The Washington Post warned in June. Some commentators, largely on the right, have cautioned that the investigations and prosecutions of Trump might widen cracks in the already-unstable foundations of the American public sphere. Last year, the National Review editor Rich Lowry cautioned in Politico that U.S. institutions “are ill-equipped to withstand the intense turbulence that would result from prosecuting the political champion of millions of people.” Writing more recently in National Review, John Yoo and John Shu argued that even a successful prosecution of Trump for his efforts to overturn the election “will leave many doubtful of the conviction and more distrustful of the Justice Department and the criminal-justice system, especially at a time when public trust in our institutions is already in decline.”

As the threats of violence and attacks on the justice system show, these concerns are not unfounded—far from it. But worrying about the dangers of prosecuting Trump is a bit like focusing on the risk that chemotherapy poses to a cancer patient’s health. The reasoning isn’t exactly wrong; it just begins the analysis in the wrong place. The chemotherapy might be ugly, but it isn’t the source of the problem. It’s the treatment for the underlying disease.

During Watergate, Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel, John Dean, famously told the president that the scandal had become a “cancer growing on the presidency.” Trump’s presence in American politics is similarly malignant. He has made the country meaner, uglier, and more violent. During his first term, he ate away at the protections guarding the U.S. system from authoritarianism, insisting on his own right to absolute power. For prosecutors to have ignored Trump’s provocations would have been to allow the cancer to progress—to acquiesce to his vision of a fundamentally corrupt politics in which the only constraint on power is the threat of vengeance.

Still, that doesn’t mean the prosecutions will be a pleasant experience. Even under the best of circumstances, the country’s first trial of a former president—especially a former president once again seeking office—would have been a high-stakes test of the ability of American political institutions to hold the powerful to account. Trump, though, seems dead set on making the experience as grueling as possible. Already, he may be headed for confrontations with the three separate judges who have cautioned him against using incendiary language and threatening witnesses—which hasn’t stopped him from attacking the prosecutors and complaining on Truth Social that Judge Chutkan is “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR.”

The analogy to chemotherapy has some obvious shortcomings. In 1978, Susan Sontag—who would herself later be diagnosed with cancer—argued in Illness as Metaphor against the temptation to dramatize disease, warning, “Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness.” Trump is not a sickness; he is a person who has the choice not to act as a destructive force.

Even so, the notion of the body politic has persisted for a reason. What would happen if the current disease were to go untreated? What might unfold if Trump continues to push the boundaries of what he can get away with—deciding, for example, to skip out on appearing at his trials? The judges and prosecutors would have to decide whether to hold Trump to the standards they would use for any other defendant and reprimand him for his insouciance—potentially, as incredible as it seems, by jailing him. A decision to hold Trump in custody before a conviction would be a bitter and contentious choice: Trump would be sure to complain about the terrible injustice and persecution he faces, eating away at public confidence in the legal system.

Likewise, there’s been a recent surge of interest in the notion that Trump may be barred from returning to the presidency under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a post–Civil War provision that disqualifies onetime government officials who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from returning to office. Any effort to block Trump’s candidacy on these grounds would surely involve a prolonged legal battle—and raise uncomfortable questions about the wisdom, in a democracy, of ruling out by judicial fiat a serious contender for the presidency. It would make for harsh medicine.

Yet this harsh medicine wouldn’t be necessary if Trump hadn’t brought this challenge to American democracy in the first place. And letting the challenge go unanswered would have far more destructive effects. The idea of the body politic, and the risks of its decay, is a very old one. Trump’s actions are the source of its current illness, and though the treatment may seem extreme—and have unpleasant side effects—it’s what’s needed to stop the disease from taking over.

The numbers were climbing on a radiation dosimeter as the minibus carried me deeper into the complex. Biohazard suits are no longer required in most parts of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, but still, I’d been given a helmet, eyewear, an N95 mask, gloves, two pairs of socks, and rubber boots. At the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, you can never be too safe.

The road to the plant passes abandoned houses, convenience stores, and gas stations where forests of weeds sprout in the asphalt cracks. Inside, ironic signs, posted after the disaster, warning of tsunami risk. In March 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off Japan’s Pacific coast and flooded the plant, knocking out its emergency diesel generators and initiating the failure of cooling systems that led to a deadly triple-reactor meltdown.

Now, looking down from a high platform, I could see a crumpled roof where a hydrogen explosion had ripped through the Unit 1 reactor the day after the tsunami hit. The eerie stillness of the place was punctuated by the rattle of heavy machinery and the cries of gulls down by the water, where an immense metal containment tank has been mangled like a dog’s chew toy. Great waves dashing against the distant breakwater shook the metal decks by the shore. Gazing out across this scene, I felt like I was standing at the vestibule of hell.

A dozen years after the roughly 50-foot waves crashed over Fukushima Daiichi, water remains its biggest problem. The nuclear fuel left over from the meltdown has a tendency to overheat, so it must be continuously cooled with water. That water becomes radioactive in the process, and so does any groundwater and rain that happens to enter the reactor buildings; all of it must be kept away from people and the environment to prevent contamination. To that end, about 1,000 dirty-water storage vats of various sizes blanket the complex. In all, they currently store 343 million gallons, and another 26,000 gallons are added to the total every day. But the power plant, its operator claims, is running out of room.

On August 24, that operator—the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO—began letting the water go. The radioactive wastewater is first being run through a system of chemical filters in an effort to strip it of dangerous constituents, and then flushed into the ocean and potentially local fisheries. Although this plan has official backing from the Japanese government and the International Atomic Energy Agency, many in the region—including local fishermen and their potential customers—are frightened by its implications.

“The IAEA has said this will have a negligible impact on people and the environment,” Junichi Matsumoto, a TEPCO official in charge of water treatment, told reporters during a briefing at Daiichi during my visit in July. Only water that meets certain purity standards would be released into the ocean, he explained. The rest would be run through the filters and pumps again as needed. But no matter how many chances it gets, TEPCO’s Advanced Liquid Processing System cannot cleanse the water of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is produced by nuclear-power plants even during normal operations, or of carbon-14. These lingering contaminants are a source of continuing anxiety.

Last month, China, the biggest importer of Japanese seafood, imposed a blanket ban on fisheries’ products from Japan, and Japanese news media have reported domestic seafood chains receiving numerous harassing phone calls originating in China. The issue has exacerbated tensions between the two countries. (The Japanese public broadcaster NHK responded by reporting that each of 13 nuclear-power plants in China released more tritium in 2021 than Daiichi will release in one year.) In South Korea, the government tried to allay fears after thousands of people protested in Seoul over the water release.

Opposition within Japan has coalesced around potential harms to local fishermen. In Fukushima, where the season for trawl fishing has just begun, workers are worried that seafood consumers in Japan and overseas will view their products as tainted and boycott them. “We have to appeal to people that they’re safe and secure, and do our best as we go forward despite falling prices and harmful rumors,” one elderly fisherman told Fukushima Broadcasting as he brought in his catch.

Government officials are doing what they can to protect that brand. Representatives from Japan’s environmental agency and Fukushima prefecture announced last week that separate tests showed no detectable levels of tritium in local seawater after the water release began. But even if its presence were observed, many experts say the environmental risks of the release are negligible. According to the IAEA, tritium is a radiation hazard to humans only if ingested in large quantities. Jukka Lehto, a professor emeritus of radiochemistry at the University of Helsinki, co-authored a detailed study of TEPCO’s purification system that found it works efficiently to remove certain radionuclides. (Lehto’s earlier research played a role in the development of the system.) Tritium is “not completely harmless,” he told me, but the threat is “very minor.” The release of purified wastewater into the sea will not, practically speaking, “cause any radiological problem to any living organism.” As for carbon-14, the Japanese government says its concentration in even the untreated wastewater is, at most, just one-tenth the country’s regulatory standards.  

[From 1976: Richard Rhodes on the benefits, costs, and risks of nuclear energy]

Opponents point to other potential problems. Greenpeace Japan says the biological impacts of releasing different radionuclides into the water, including strontium-90 and iodine-129, have been ignored. (When asked about these radionuclides, a spokesperson for the utility told me that the dirty water is “treated with cesium/strontium-filtering equipment to remove most of the contamination” and then subsequently processed to remove “most of the remaining nuclides except for tritium.”) Last December, the Virginia-based National Association of Marine Laboratories put out a position paper arguing that neither TEPCO nor the Japanese government has provided “adequate and accurate scientific data” to demonstrate the project’s safety, and alleged that there are “flaws in sampling protocols, statistical design, sample analyses, and assumptions.” (TEPCO did not respond to a request for comment on these claims.)

If, as these groups worry, the water from Fukushima does end up contaminating the ocean, scientific proof could be hard to find. In 2019, for example, scientists reported the results of a study that had begun eight years earlier, to monitor water near San Diego for iodine-129 released by the Fukushima meltdown. None was found, in spite of expectations based on ocean currents. When the scientists checked elsewhere on the West Coast, they found high levels of iodine-129 in the Columbia River in Washington—but Fukushima was not to blame. The source of that contamination was the nearby site where plutonium had been produced for the nuclear bomb that the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki.

Concerns about the safety of the water release persist in part because of TEPCO’s history of wavering transparency. In 2016, for instance, a commission tasked with investigating the utility’s actions during the 2011 disaster found that its leader at the time told staff not to use the term core meltdown. Even now, the company has put out analyses of the contents of only three-fifths of the dirty-water storage tanks on-site, Ken Buesseler, the director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me earlier this summer. Japan’s environmental ministry maintains that 62 radionuclides other than tritium can be sufficiently removed from the wastewater using TEPCO’s filtration system, but Buesseler believes that not enough is known about the levels of those contaminants in all of the tanks to make this claim. Instead of flushing the water now, he said, it should first be completely analyzed, and then alternatives to dumping, such as longer on-site storage or using the water to make concrete for tsunami barriers, should be considered.

It looks like that radioactive ship has sailed, however. The release that began in August is expected to continue for as long as the plant decommissioning lasts, which means that contaminated water will continue to flow out to the Pacific Ocean at least until the 2050s. In this case, the argument over relative risks—and whether Fukushima’s dirty water will ever be made clean enough for dumping to proceed—has already been decided. But parallel, and unresolved, debates attend to nuclear power on the whole. Leaving aside the wisdom of building nuclear reactors in an archipelago prone to earthquakes and tsunami, plants such as Daiichi provide cleaner energy than fossil-fuel facilities, and proponents say they’re vital to the process of decarbonizing the economy.

Some 60 nuclear reactors are under construction around the world and will join the hundreds of others that now deliver about 10 percent of global electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association. Meltdowns like the one that happened in Fukushima in 2011, or at Chernobyl in 1986, are very rare. The WNA says that these are the only major accidents to have occurred in 18,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operations, and that reactor design is always improving. But the possibility of disaster, remote as it may be in any given year, is ever-present. For instance, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, Europe’s largest, has been threatened by military strikes and loss of electricity during the war in Ukraine, increasing the chances of meltdown. It took just 25 years for an accident at the scale of Chernobyl’s to be repeated.

[Read: Reckoning with the legacy of the nuclear reactor, 75 years later]

“We are faced with a difficult choice, either to continue using nuclear power while accepting that a major accident is likely to occur somewhere every 20 or 30 years, or to forgo its possible role in helping slow climate change that will make large swaths of the globe uninhabitable in coming decades,” says Azby Brown, the lead researcher at Safecast, a nonprofit environmental-monitoring group that began tracking radiation from Fukushima in 2011.

The Fukushima water release underscores the fact that the risks associated with nuclear energy are never zero and that dealing with nuclear waste is a dangerous, long-term undertaking where mistakes can be extremely costly. TEPCO and the Japanese government made a difficult, unpopular decision to flush the water. In the next few decades, they will have to show that it was the right thing to do.