During our time in Fukushima, we heard many references to Germany’s simultaneous shuttering of conventional generation sources and their accelerated roll-out of renewable energy. The mentality of many Japanese people is “if Germany can do it, so can we.” In this installment of this series, we will take a look at the feasibility of such major fuel shifts in Germany and Japan.
Despite decontamination efforts, some farmers in Fukushima are having trouble bouncing back because of widespread skepticism around claims of safety. The local economy is shifting to include green technology, but it remains to be seen if Fukushima can ever shake its stigma. While the government would like to put the accident in the past, there are some who don’t want it forgotten or excused.
I was hesitant to join an Exclusion Zone tour but not because of radiation: I didn’t want to seem like an insensitive tourist gawking at a disaster. I ultimately went so I could speak with the people who lived there and share their stories. Here is what we heard from people who lived through it – it was both sadder and more hopeful than I expected.
Fukushima is absolutely safe for tourists. In fact, you will absorb far more radiation on the flight to Tokyo than on the ground in the exclusion zone. The image of danger comes from the fact that some places are still closed to the public because of contamination, but cleanup efforts continue (with an expected ¥30 trillion price tag over a 40-year initiative).
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.
For years I have wrestled with the moral quandary of weighing my love of travel and seeing beautiful places in the world with the knowledge that continued air travel to those places will likely hasten their destruction. That knowledge has not stopped me from traveling (at least not yet), but it does result in more frequent pangs of guilt every time I board a plane.
Our third night in the woods of Virginia met with some interesting effects on my brain in particular. How much of it was a legitimate effect versus my expectation of finding something unusual? I can’t answer that, but I can say that I did feel better (physically, emotionally, and spiritually) while camping and plan to make time for more of it in the future.
Our Memorial Day weekend adventure continues with day two of camping in the mountains of Virginia. Question: what happens when you get curious, introspective people out of their daily lives and into the forest? Apparently you get discussions around philosophy, psychology, anthropology, brain chemistry, culture, society, and unexplainable phenomena tied to the nature of reality. And s’mores. You get s’mores too.