The City of Fairbanks unanimously passed a resolution Monday calling for more radiation monitoring of their coastline as we enter the third anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. While radiation levels there are still a fraction of harmful levels, the goal is to watch for trends to ensure that the levels do not get any higher.
The resolution was introduced by Fairbanks City Mayor John Eberhart and had the support of the council and several people who came to testify. Among them was John Davies, a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly. Davies said he was concerned about radiation from Japan spreading to salmon he dip nets for at Chitina.
The disaster will be an ongoing problem for many years to come. It will require constant monitoring by the US of its coast for the foreseeable future and constant cleanup work by Japan. Last year, a new documentary, "Nuclear Nation," opened.
Approximately eighteen thousand people died or were lost in the wake of the March 11, 2011, earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, and tens of thousands remain displaced, unable to return to their homes for now, and perhaps forever. The earthquake and tsunami completely erased entire towns from the Google Maps of northern Japan, but the manmade nuclear crisis has unleashed corrosive fallout, literal and otherwise, that is arguably more persistent and bracing. You might lose your home, livelihood, and loved ones to a natural disaster, but it’s hard to strike back at abstract targets like nature and the gods. When an energy conglomerate, government policy, and corruption cause death and displacement, and disfigure your future, you might get motivated.
The former Mayor of Futaba is one of the prominent characters of this documentary. He fears that this story will replicate itself many times over.
What passes for the main character in “Nuclear Nation,” and in the plight of the unfinishable story of Fukushima, is Futaba’s former mayor, Katsutaka Idogawa. His story anchors the narrative, and it is brutally banal. Humiliated by Tokyo politicians, disappointing his constituency, his final admission is that he trusted others too much, and will never overcome the loss. Idogawa was ousted earlier this year, replaced by a more Tokyo-friendly mayor, Funahashi told me. If you can’t go home again, then “Nuclear Nation,” he promises, is just the first of many installments about a story of human disaster that may never end.
The disaster was the worst nuclear power plant disaster in human history.
The earthquake and tsunami killed 18,000 people, and the World Bank estimated right after the disaster that it would cost $145 billion for a cleanup that would take many years. What are our leaders doing to ensure that such a disaster never happens again?