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In Fukushima, A Bitter Legacy Of Radiation, Trauma and Fear
In Fukushima, A Bitter Legacy Of Radiation, Trauma and Fear
Five years after the nuclear power plant meltdown, a journey through the Fukushima evacuation zone reveals some high levels of radiation and an overriding sense of fear. For many, the psychological damage is far more profound than the health effects.
It is a largely empty highway now, winding through abandoned villages and past overgrown rice paddy fields. For two days in August, I traveled its length to assess the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in the company of Baba Isao, an assemblyman who represents the town of Namie, located just three miles from the power plant and one of four major towns that remain evacuated.
At times, the radiation levels seemed scarily high – still too high for permanent occupation. But radiation was just the start.
As we climbed into the mountains, the radiation measurements on the Geiger counter increased.
More worrying, I discovered, was the psychological and political fallout from the accident. While the radiation – most of it now from caesium-137, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 30 years – is decaying, dispersing, or being cleaned up, it is far from clear that this wider trauma has yet peaked. Fukushima is going to be in rehab for decades.
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On Burning Ground: The Human Cost Of India’s Push to Produce More Coal
On Burning Ground: The Human Cost Of India’s Push to Produce More Coal
As part of India’s modernization program, Prime Minister Narenda Modi has called for doubling the nation’s coal production by 2020. For the villages in the Jharia coalfield, which is frequently shrouded in smoke from underground fires, the government’s plans have only increased the pressures and dangers of living alongside huge, burning open-pit mines.
“Come,” says Raju. “Let me show you my house.” His clean white shirt, well-brushed hair, and calm demeanor belie the almost apocalyptic landscape in which he and his family lived.
But Raju’s family and the 50 others that cling on here say they will not go without proper compensation and new homes near to their jobs in these mines. “We’ve got nothing from the government,” Raju tells me, as we inspect a crack that has opened up in his living room floor. “We want a better deal or we will not move.” Until, presumably, their houses fall into the abyss below.
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El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder
El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder
This year’s El Niño phenomenon is spawning extreme weather around the planet. Now scientists are working to understand if global warming will lead to more powerful El Niños that will make droughts, floods, snowstorms, and hurricanes more intense.
Wild weather is gripping the planet. An El Niño has been wreaking havoc around the world, causing major flooding in South America, droughts in Indonesia and southern Africa, an unprecedented hurricane season in the North Pacific last fall, and much more.
Climatologists are still calculating whether this is the biggest El Niño on record. What they do agree on is that there have now been three “super-El Niños” in the space of just over three decades — in 1982-83, 1997-98, and now 2015-16. This unusual recurrence gives weight to a forecast made by Wenju Cai of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, two years ago that headline-grabbing “super El Niños” were in the process of upgrading from once every 20 years to once every ten years.
So what is going on? Is global warming beginning to cause more frequent and intense El Niños? And what effect might more powerful El Niño cycles have on the planet’s steadily warming climate?
El Niños are short-term aberrations of ocean currents and weather systems that start in the waters of the tropical Pacific and send shock waves around the world. They usually occur after several years of calm conditions during which prevailing tropical winds blowing across the world’s largest ocean pile warm water up in the west of the Pacific, around Indonesia.
This cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, there is a breakout. The warm waters turn and wash back east toward the Americas.
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