When I told friends we would be touring the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, some people were horrified and asked why we would expose ourselves to “that kind of radiation.” Years of misinformation in pop culture and news media have created a general public with such a skewed idea of what happened in Fukushima that many believe it was a second Chernobyl. It wasn’t.
In addition to little being known about nuclear energy in general, there is also little commonly known about the events that took place at Fukushima Daiichi in days following the March 2011 earthquake. A string of failures that seemingly never should have happened in conjunction with each other resulted in the evacuation of 160,000 people and radioactive contamination that is still being cleaned up today.
On March 11, 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit 80 miles off the coast of Sendai, a city in northeast Japan. The earthquake and resulting tsunami caused major devastation along the coast and critically damaged a nuclear power plant, putting Fukushima on the map and changing the face of the global energy industry. This series details my experience in visiting the exclusion zone nine years later.