Photo © Sylvia de Swann Thomas Bass is the author of eight books, including The Eudaemonic Pie and The Predictors, which are being made into a documentary film. A contributor to The New Yorker, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Smithsonian, Wired, and other publications, he is Professor of English and Journalism at the State University of New York at Albany.

“There is a lot of amnesia about the history of this technology,” Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian, says. “Nuclear power has never lived up to its promise. It is part of an ideology of material plenty and abundance. ‘Too cheap to meter,’ it fuels a world in which consumption is a good thing.” Progressives embrace nuclear energy because they believe it is carbon free and a potential end to global warming. Conservatives embrace it because it allows us to escape the limits of growth. The ideology of boundless energy has a hammerlock on government policy and propaganda. As the failures unfurl before our eyes, logic surrenders to magic.

On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as I exited through the gift shop I was surrounded by T-shirts, coffee mugs, and refrigerator magnets bearing images of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. One of the most reproduced images in the world, this wood-block print in Prussian blue shows a wave in the shape of a fractalized claw about to crush the tiny fishermen rowing boats off the coast in front of Mount Fuji. Nature menaces. Men struggle. The gods remain silent on their cloud-covered peak.

Another great wave washed over the eastern shore of Japan in the spring of 2011, killing twenty thousand people and knocking out the electricity and cooling pumps at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As three atomic reactors exploded and a fourth was breached from the side, 160,000 people fled the radioactive clouds that produced an expanding circle of ghost towns and abandoned fields and farms. Today, this nuclear exclusion zone, like those around Chernobyl, Hanford, Bikini, and Mayak, offers a foretaste of what happens when human imagination succumbs to human folly. Atomic fallout is one of the golden spikes defining the start of the Anthropocene. Named for ourselves, this is the only geological epoch defined by human waste.

I traveled to Fukushima in 2018 and again four and a half years later. The difference was dramatic. The place had been cleaned up and reopened; not fully, but little by little people have been learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave set to wash over this seismically precarious part of the world. My first report, published in 2020, focused on Japan’s preparations for the Olympic Games, which opened in Fukushima as part of the area’s recovery. The effort involved a fair amount of fakery, as the government created a Potemkin stage for showing only the rebuilt parts of eastern Japan and downplaying the area’s still-pervasive contamination.

By the time of my second visit, in the fall of 2022, Fukushima was indeed beginning to show signs of recovery, but the good news was being drowned in a sea of bad publicity, as the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) prepared to release over a million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. With a history of faking safety reports and hiding problems at its nuclear reactors, Tepco has failed to account for the full load of radionuclides in its contaminated water. Instead, it insists that this “treated” water is no more radioactive than the effluent flowing from the rest of the world’s nuclear reactors.

My two reports from Fukushima are being run in reverse order, the more recent account coming first. This reflects the news out of Japan. It also highlights the latest depredations from this ongoing disaster. I added the new introductory chapter after Japan began releasing Fukushima’s contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean during the summer of 2023.

I write about people living in nuclear exclusion zones because I suspect that the skills employed by these people will become increasingly useful. The Kobayashis, my hosts in Fukushima, have made five trips to Chernobyl. A lot of information and equipment is shared between “self settlers” in Ukraine and the residents of Fukushima. Many books have been written about life after a nuclear holocaust, not to mention thousands of video games, films, manga, and other cultural responses ranging from operas (John Adams’s Doctor Atomic) to cartoons (Walt Disney’s Our Friend the Atom). In most of these imagined apocalypses the heroes survive. Like Godzilla, the Japanese monster created by fallout from the hydrogen bomb, people and animals acquire special powers from being irradiated. They survive by luck or skill or by killing their opponents. Personally, I am not sanguine about my chances of surviving a major atomic disaster, but for a look at how it might be done, this story offers possibilities and surprises.

Photo © Sylvia de Swann Thomas Bass is the author of eight books, including The Eudaemonic Pie and The Predictors, which are being made into a documentary film. A contributor to The New Yorker, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Smithsonian, Wired, and other publications, he is Professor of English and Journalism at the State University of New York at Albany.

“There is a lot of amnesia about the history of this technology,” Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian, says. “Nuclear power has never lived up to its promise. It is part of an ideology of material plenty and abundance. ‘Too cheap to meter,’ it fuels a world in which consumption is a good thing.” Progressives embrace nuclear energy because they believe it is carbon free and a potential end to global warming. Conservatives embrace it because it allows us to escape the limits of growth. The ideology of boundless energy has a hammerlock on government policy and propaganda. As the failures unfurl before our eyes, logic surrenders to magic.

On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as I exited through the gift shop I was surrounded by T-shirts, coffee mugs, and refrigerator magnets bearing images of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. One of the most reproduced images in the world, this wood-block print in Prussian blue shows a wave in the shape of a fractalized claw about to crush the tiny fishermen rowing boats off the coast in front of Mount Fuji. Nature menaces. Men struggle. The gods remain silent on their cloud-covered peak.

Another great wave washed over the eastern shore of Japan in the spring of 2011, killing twenty thousand people and knocking out the electricity and cooling pumps at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As three atomic reactors exploded and a fourth was breached from the side, 160,000 people fled the radioactive clouds that produced an expanding circle of ghost towns and abandoned fields and farms. Today, this nuclear exclusion zone, like those around Chernobyl, Hanford, Bikini, and Mayak, offers a foretaste of what happens when human imagination succumbs to human folly. Atomic fallout is one of the golden spikes defining the start of the Anthropocene. Named for ourselves, this is the only geological epoch defined by human waste.

I traveled to Fukushima in 2018 and again four and a half years later. The difference was dramatic. The place had been cleaned up and reopened; not fully, but little by little people have been learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave set to wash over this seismically precarious part of the world. My first report, published in 2020, focused on Japan’s preparations for the Olympic Games, which opened in Fukushima as part of the area’s recovery. The effort involved a fair amount of fakery, as the government created a Potemkin stage for showing only the rebuilt parts of eastern Japan and downplaying the area’s still-pervasive contamination.

By the time of my second visit, in the fall of 2022, Fukushima was indeed beginning to show signs of recovery, but the good news was being drowned in a sea of bad publicity, as the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) prepared to release over a million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. With a history of faking safety reports and hiding problems at its nuclear reactors, Tepco has failed to account for the full load of radionuclides in its contaminated water. Instead, it insists that this “treated” water is no more radioactive than the effluent flowing from the rest of the world’s nuclear reactors.

My two reports from Fukushima are being run in reverse order, the more recent account coming first. This reflects the news out of Japan. It also highlights the latest depredations from this ongoing disaster. I added the new introductory chapter after Japan began releasing Fukushima’s contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean during the summer of 2023.

I write about people living in nuclear exclusion zones because I suspect that the skills employed by these people will become increasingly useful. The Kobayashis, my hosts in Fukushima, have made five trips to Chernobyl. A lot of information and equipment is shared between “self settlers” in Ukraine and the residents of Fukushima. Many books have been written about life after a nuclear holocaust, not to mention thousands of video games, films, manga, and other cultural responses ranging from operas (John Adams’s Doctor Atomic) to cartoons (Walt Disney’s Our Friend the Atom). In most of these imagined apocalypses the heroes survive. Like Godzilla, the Japanese monster created by fallout from the hydrogen bomb, people and animals acquire special powers from being irradiated. They survive by luck or skill or by killing their opponents. Personally, I am not sanguine about my chances of surviving a major atomic disaster, but for a look at how it might be done, this story offers possibilities and surprises.