Photograph by Kora Freeman-Gerlach
Communicating with Beings of the Future By Kora Freeman-Gerlach A few years back, I stood in the nuclear wasteland of Minamisoma, Japan. With a Geiger counter in hand, tracking the fluctuation of radiation with each step I took, I felt the eerie silence of invisible toxicity that had taken over this coastal town. Years after the meltdown of the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Minamisoma was still barren and deserted. There were rusted cars flipped upside down, neighborhood streets filled with trash, and open-air structures that were once enclosed homes. There was no sign of human activity, let alone any kind of life; maybe it was the road signs that flashed warnings of elevated radiation levels that steered people away. This is the image of a tsunami turned nuclear disaster. I wonder what it looks like there now, 11 years after the initial disaster. I wonder if the cars still stand on their heads, if pacifiers and shattered pill bottles still line the roads. I wonder if nuclear refugees are still living in temporary homes, where they have created a new community with others like them, forced from their original homes by the risk of exposure to toxic radiation. The problem with radiation is that it is persistent; several years is insufficient time to reduce its toxicity or minimize its harm.
The Fukushima-Daiichi disaster was the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake caused a massive tsunami along the eastern coast of Japan in the Tohoku region. Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima-Daiichi plant was hit by the earthquake and tsunami, causing a series of explosions, meltdowns, and an evacuation of almost 200,000 people in the area, according to a report by CNN published at the time. This tragic nuclear disaster displaced hundreds of thousands of residents and caused widespread economic and ecological devastation. According to a report by CNN’s Wayne Drash, Japan is scarce in traditional resources used to produce energy, such as fossil fuels, thus making it highly reliant on nuclear power. However, following the 2011 nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, all 54 nuclear plants around the country shut down, and just nine of them have since opened back. As reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Henri Paillere and Jeffrey Donovan, there was widespread distrust among the public after the catastrophic event, which made people reluctant to support nuclear power again.
Headwaters Magazine 20
