Iitate Villlage is actually outside of the 12-mile radius, but was still heavily contaminated after the radioactive plume traveled northwest following the hydrogen explosion. Piles of contaminated soil resting in temporary storage units are dotted across the village and the prefecture.
Fields of rapeseed flowers are a common sight within the exclusion zone. It's believed these seeds absorb radioactive isotopes in the soil. It's known as process called bioremediation, which is the use of living organisms that reduce soil contamination. While hard to determine the extent of decontamination capability, the oil produced by the rape seed is free from contaminants.
A clock in Ukedo Elementary School is forever stopped at 3:38 p.m., the moment the tsunami struck Namie Village.
A building sits partially collapsed from the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off the coast of Tohoku. Namie is within a few miles of the Daiichi Nuclear Reactor and thus is abandoned.
Outside of Okuma Village, about three miles from the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the geiger counter shows that radiation levels remain high. Radiation can be difficult to understand. To put the 6.07 microsieverts per hour into comparison, Koriyama City, 42 miles away, averages around .154 microsieverts per hour.
"I used to teach here [at Odaka Techinical High School] but a few years after the disaster I retired," says Akiko Onuki a resident of Soma City who now helps run study tours through the evacuation zone, "One day our grandchildren will grow up and ask what our generation has done for them. I think about what I can do for the future. I have two grandchildren now, and I hope to have more. I have to give them a bright future. That is why I take people on tours [through the evacuation zone]. I want to show visitors what humans have done, and to help make sure that we learn from our mistakes."
Ukedo Elementary School, on the coast of Fukushima Prefecture, was abandoned soon after the tsunami. The students were evacuated before the tsunami struck, and survived.
Yoshizawa Masami, the owner of The Ranch of Hope at the border of Iitate and Namie. He has defied evacuation and kill orders and has stayed behind to care for the area's abandoned cattle out of protest.
A cemetery on the coast of Fukushima Prefecture remains in ruin about four miles from the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
A house blasted from the tsunami wave lies in ruin. While debris has largely been cleaned up by decontamination crews, houses that weren't totally destroyed are left to deteriorate with the effects of time and weather.
FUKUSHIMA, Japan—What would you do if your house was physically spared from a nuclear disaster, and yet you still had to leave it all behind? What would you bring? What would you leave?
For hundreds of thousands of residents within a 12-mile (19-kilometer) radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, this was their reality.
While radiation levels have fallen in the five years since the massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the plant, it may be impossible for the residents of Fukushima’s ghost towns to ever return.
Living in the prefecture as a Fulbright National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow has given me a new perspective on the Fukushima way of life, but while I learn about what happened here, I often feel limited in my ability to understand the full impact of the devastation. Koriyama, the city I’ve called home for the past five months, is over 40 miles (64 kilometers) away from the crippled nuclear reactor.
Last week, I got the chance to visit evacuated cities with the non profit group Nomado, which offers educational trips into the exclusion zone to study the effects of the disaster. After listening to stories for months, I wanted to see for myself what had been taken away from these nuclear refugees. Here is what I saw.
Ari M. Beser is the grandson of Lt. Jacob Beser, the only U.S. serviceman aboard both bomb-carrying B-29s. He is traveling through Japan with the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship to report on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima. Beser will give voice to people directly affected by nuclear technology today, as well as work with Japanese and Americans to encourage a message of reconciliation and nuclear disarmament. His new book, “The Nuclear Family,” focuses on the American and Japanese perspectives of the atomic bombings.
Source National Geographic
No comments:
Post a Comment