Still a bleak outlook, one year later

Japan’s 3/11 Triple Catastrophe Endures in Broken Families, Divided Towns

Chikako Abe’s desk is decorated with flowers and candy at her school in Minamisoma, a reminder of a 17-year-old life cut short a year ago. Instead of attending a graduation ceremony this month, her family will pray tomorrow at the ruins of a house where the sea snatched away the lives of Chikako, her father and two grandparents.

It's hard to believe that a year has gone by since the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster hit Japan. Oeconomic, cultural, and bureaucratic issues are hampering recovery, but on the other hand, can we really expect any nation to bounce back quickly with such a triple disaster, especially given the lingering uncertainty of radiation?

My thoughts tonight are with the people whose lives were changed forever by this disaster, people who lost family, homes, and livelihoods, and also trust of their government to protect them.

Japan marks 1 year since quake, tsunami disaster

Japan on Sunday was remembering the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck the nation one year ago, killing just over 19,000 people and unleashing the world's worst nuclear crisis in a quarter century.

Along the tsunami-battered northeastern coast, in Tokyo and elsewhere, memorial ceremonies were planned to mark 2:46 p.m. — the precise moment the magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit on March 11, 2011.

The quake was the strongest recorded in Japan's history, and set off a tsunami that towered more than 65 feet (20 meters) in some spots along the northeastern coast, destroying thousands of homes and wreaking widespread destruction.

Today, some 325,000 people rendered homeless remain in temporary housing. While much of the debris has been gathered into massive piles, very little rebuilding has begun.

Timely to remember, given current events

March 28, 1979: Reactor Meltdown at Three Mile Island
I was about as far away from Three Mile Island as you could be and still be in the United States (I was in the middle of the Mojave Desert). I must admit I don't really remember much about it from the news--that was before 24-hour news channels exposed and picked apart every aspect of a story before your eyes, and I was about to turn 12 and was more interested in surviving 7th grade and dealing with menarche. In fact I'm pretty sure I learned about it from watching Lou Grant, a show I loved that had lots of gritty reporters.

But it was a very scary thing, and although it pales compared to the results of Chernobyl, I have been very leery of nuclear power ever since I first learned about Three Mile Island. It just doesn't seem smart to rely on a plant that 1) has waste that will stay radioactive for years and no one wants in their backyard and 2) when things go wrong, like a loss of power such as in Japan, things really go wrong, putting the population but more importantly our very environment at risk, in such a way that we may never know just how wrong things went.

That's my take on it, anyway. I know there is no 'perfect' energy source, but nuclear is so far from perfect. And where in the hell did it ever get the moniker 'clean energy', given the waste left behind?

Worries and hopes regarding the dangers of radiation in Japan

Hiroshima survivors fear new nuclear fallout

The cities flattened by last week's earthquake look eerily similar to the decimated buildings Shigeko Sasamori saw after an atomic bomb was dropped on her hometown in 1945.

The floodwaters from the tsunami -- the waves of debris and bodies -- remind her of the rivers in Hiroshima, Japan, swamped with corpses.

And the struggle to contain radioactive emissions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant makes Sasamori, 78, wonder if the crisis there will plague a new generation in Japan.

"Radiation is the most horrible thing, and it's more horrible to me because humans make it," she said from her home near Los Angeles. "We don't have to make that."

Sasamori is a hibakusha, or heat radiation survivor -- a name given to those who lived through the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

For them, radiation is an invisible enemy that has haunted them, claimed their loved ones, altered their bodies and threatened their lives.

Please don't be a triple disaster

Earthquake, tsunami, and now fears of a nuclear meltdown...

In Japan, fears of a threat no one can see

Meltdown fear after nuclear plant blast

Reactor not damaged in Japan nuclear plant explosion

Radiation leaks from Japan's quake-hit nuclear plant

Also...

9,500 unaccounted for in Japanese port city: report

More than 9,500 people are unaccounted for in Minamisanriku, a town of some 17,000 people, Japan's Kyodo News agency reported Saturday.

24 years ago today...

April 26, 1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Suffers Cataclysmic Meltdown

Chernobyl disaster

Images of Chernobyl filmed in the days right after the incident:


The first part of a documentary on the disaster:


Animals and nature take over what humans abandoned in the Zone of Alienation (but whether they are actually flourishing is open to debate):


Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' (counterpoint to the last)